<p>Starting a career in programming can be intimidating. Whether you're switching careers, joining a bootcamp, starting a C.S. degree, or learning on your own, this book can help, with practical advice on topics like code reviews, resume writing, fitting in, ethics, and finding your dream job.</p>

Your First Year in Code

Preface

Introduction: Code is the best, code is the worst

There are many industries (law, medicine, etc.) where a formal credential is required before you begin work in the field. By contrast, the software development field, like many creative fields (business, art, etc.), does not require that you have a formal credential to start working in the field. Given this fact, there are different learning pathways you can take to reach your goal of becoming a professional software developer.

Different learning pathways into tech

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How (not) to learn

Note This is the longest chapter by far. It also contains a fair amount of sarcasm. Many people appreciate the light humor in such a long read, but be sure to take it with a grain of salt. 

How to code (in one chapter)

When you start out coding, you usually spend a year or two completely oblivious to the rules of “good code.” You may hear words like “elegant” or “clean” tossed around, but you can’t define them. That’s okay. For a programmer without any experience, the main metric worth keeping tabs on is “does it work?”

Steps to better code

In your climb to the highest peaks of the programming world, hopefully you will encounter a plethora of languages, resources, conversations, and people. All of them will be accessible to you through tools , whether they be a web browser, an editor, a compiler or something else, depending on the task at hand. The choice of what tool to use for a given job may be daunting at the beginning and is one you shouldn’t waste too much precious time on—that time is best spent actually learning and coding. This chapter will help you to understand how important your choice of tools for coding is, or is not, and why so many programmers care a great deal about theirs.

Programming tools

Programming is primarily about translation. You take the desires of a user and translate them into source code. It’s a process requiring a strong understanding of technology, the users, and all the people involved in development.

You are an interpreter

I occasionally get a message from a brand-new developer who’s overwhelmed by all the technologies and choices that exist in the world of software development. Where do you even start? Some of these devs have seen job advertisements like the following:

What to learn first

“You need to learn how to learn” is a phrase you will often hear as you start on your journey.

Learning to learn

This chapter will be about side projects and I would like to convince all of you that they are great!

Make the most of side projects

Getting hired is hard at first. I mean, eventually you’ll have an amazing resume and recruiters will be flooding your inbox with interview requests, but for the first little while it can seem like an incredibly tough market. Everyone’s looking for senior developers, interviews are all whiteboards and obscure data structures, and some jobs turn out to be unpaid “internships” or “software farms” that mistreat and devalue their employees.

Getting your first job

My first job was at a small tech firm as a Junior Front End Developer. The salary was low, but I was desperately needy and eager to get into the industry, learn, and work. I didn’t care about anything in the contract. They asked me when I could join, and I went straight to the office the very next day.

My first job

When I started my first job in tech, it was as a support team member at a website builder geared toward musicians. My background made me ideal: years of retail and entertainment-industry customer service, HTML and CSS experience with an interest in web design, a music business degree, and the vocabulary to communicate with low-level tech users. I was pumped—a dream job that felt created just for me. I’d never considered that there was a company out there that married my disparate passions, let alone that I could land a job there.

I got my dream job. Now what?

Editor's Note: Burnout is so pervasive and harmful in tech that I’ve chosen to include two perspectives on it. Programmers burn out for a lot of different reasons and you will either witness it or experience it yourself at some point. When that happens, take some advice from these authors and make a change. 

Burnout, part 1

Burnout: a hazard that the software industry is particularly prone to, and one that occurs far more often than it should. Over the course of your career you’ll hear the stories of your co-worker’s friend who burned out so badly they ended up changing careers. Perhaps it is closer to home and happens to someone you personally know. We all tell ourselves that it won’t happen to us, that we love programming far too much to burn out, so we don’t take the necessary steps to avoid it. But burnout is a very real threat, and it will happen to some extent to many of us. I didn’t believe it could affect me, yet I have dealt with episodes of burnout throughout my career. By understanding burnout, its symptoms and causes, we can take concrete steps to avoid it altogether and to come back from being burned out.

Burnout, part 2

Editor's Note: Following are some true stories and advice from developers who have wondered if tech is the right place for them. If you’ve had the same doubts, I hope their words will encourage you. 

Do I fit in?

Women in code

Part of a programmer’s job is chasing down missing semicolons and complex caching issues, scrutinizing and head-scratching over every line of code in an application. This is one of the most frustrating things about code: we use it to offload complexity from our brains, but the inverse of this benefit is that any useful program will be too complex for us to wrap our minds around completely. Complexity creates unknowns, and every unknown is a bug waiting to happen.

What to do when you're stuck

Are you a coder, programmer, developer, engineer, architect or something else?

Choosing a job title

Buzzwords are common in this industry. They’re used everywhere (sometimes in the wrong way) and because of that, people are often afraid to ask 101-level questions as they don’t want to sound ignorant.

The DevOps introduction I wish I had

Code can do amazing things. We’re all the beneficiaries of it: computers, cell phones, the internet, MRI machines—it’s hard to imagine a world without software.

A coder's code of ethics

One of the greatest paradoxes of software development is the relative unimportance of code. As engineers we study code, we teach about code, we agonize over code, we go to conferences and debate each other and dream vivid dreams about code. Yet there is no line of code in any programming language that will make a company profitable or an idea successful. Applications are of course valuable, and largely responsible for the experiences that shape the modern world, but most applications could be equally useful if they were written in a different programming language, under a different paradigm, using different techniques and algorithms. There are infinite ways to write a program. Sometimes one way is faster than another, sometimes more readable, sometimes more error-resistant. But usually it’s just different.

Software development beyond the keyboard

Code reviews

Following, in alphabetical order, are some terms that are commonly used among software developers. You may have learned some of them already. Note that these definitions aren’t intended to be comprehensive, but rather to help you understand and participate in online and offline conversations about code as quickly as possible. Many of them are based on the most common situations and may not apply to every company or tool (e.g. the definitions relating to version control are specific to Git, the most popular version control system).

Appendix A: A coder's vocabulary

Deciding what to learn can be easier if you know what you want to build. To that end, below are some things you might be interested in building and some of the most popular tools used to make them. Note that this isn’t a complete or comprehensive list—there are many more things a developer can make and many tools used to make them.

Appendix B: To make this, learn that

Code Complete by Steve McConnell. A several-hundred-page deep-dive on how to write clean, bug-free code.

Appendix C: Recommended reading

Thanks to everyone who supported this book. It was very much a group effort, and it’s been amazing to work with all of you.

Community Questions