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Career Advice

I just got asked for career advice by a former co-worker and I thought I might share my answer here…

As far as career advice goes…

Learning and doing are paramount. People who do are much more important than people who talk about doing.
Make mistakes, be wrong, plan to throw at least one away.
Look at each bug and spend 5 minutes asking how you got there and how you’ll avoid it next time.
Make loud mistakes. When you mess up, acknowledge it, and then learn from it.
Be the worst in the band for at least the next 5 years. That will probably mean moving every 2-3 years or so as you plateau at each place.
Read 1 nerd book a month and you’ll be 12x the industry average.
Make sure your boss knows what your current career goals are (eg, become an awesome back end dev, focus on scaling, etc).
Go to conferences/user groups/hack nights and actually talk to people. Code with them too.
Read code. As much as you can get your head around.
Spend 30 minutes each day improving something about your process (automate the thing you repeat the most) or environment (editor, shell, OS, etc).
Focus on making it work, but then spend 5-10 minutes before each commit and polish. I often write 2 or 3 versions of a paragraph of code and weigh my options.
Read the original wiki and slurp up as much wisdom as you can. Those fuckers are smart.

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