How to become a better programmer? Advice from Coders Lab’s Head of Education
Jacek Tchórzewski, the Founder and Head of Education at Coders Lab, is sure that continuous development is the key to success in the programming profession. Whether you are just starting your career as a programmer or have many years of experience, you must not rest on your laurels.
Ensure continued and continuous development - otherwise, you may fall out of technology.
The IT industry has always been a market of rapidly changing competencies. Libraries, frameworks, and entire technologies are changing. That's why my main advice to anyone involved in IT is to keep your hand on the pulse constantly. It's worth taking an interest in what's hot now and what changes are taking place in technology and software development. That way, you won't fall out of the loop.
Networking is becoming increasingly critical - and I mean “live” networking.
More and more often, I see examples of senior coders getting exciting job offers. However, many of these opportunities would not have come up if it wasn’t for networking. Due to networking (and face-to-face - I don't believe too much in online networking), we can get all sorts of opportunities that we would otherwise miss. At the same time, we can present ourselves as human beings and expose our character a little bit so that we are evaluated not only from the perspective of our technical skills. I encourage everyone to attend various meetups, conferences, etc.
Take care of work-life balance - especially if you work from home.
Recent years have not been easy for anyone (although the IT sector turned out to be rather bulletproof in times of crisis). Many people have moved from their offices to their homes. I highly recommend managing your work-life balance if this was also your case. After almost two years of working remotely, I see more burnout among my colleagues than after a dozen years in the office. Let’s take care of our mental hygiene at work, especially at home offices.
Supplement your skills with soft skills and business skills.
It is worthwhile to complement technical skills, i.e., knowledge of languages, libraries, and frameworks, with soft ones. Your superiors will appreciate it if, instead of blindly following some guidelines, you raise a red flag if some functionality does not make much sense. Therefore, I recommend getting familiar with your industry and understanding its needs. In addition, it is worth understanding what the life cycle of the product you are working on looks like, how data for analysis is obtained, etc. This will enable us to create better and better systems.