Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

https://www.learninpublic.org/?from=Hacker%20News

by swyx • 6 years ago

245 119 6 years ago

swyx19• 6 years ago

Hi HN! I have been writing since April, but this book has been years in the making. So glad to launch it today!

Since I switched careers from finance and started doing freeCodeCamp in 2017, I have been studying the principles, strategies, and tactics that make great developers successful and applying it to my own career. This has helped me get hired at a Senior level at AWS in just 3 years. While between jobs, I decided to take the time to write down everything I've learned about the tech industry - everything I wish I had known, everything I believe to be true, everything I think an individual contributor developer needs to build an exceptional career:

- Going from Junior to Senior

- Learning in Public

- Tech Strategy (the Business of Software)

- Why You Should Write (A Lot!)

- Engineering Career Ladders

- Developer's Guide to Twitter

- Marketing Yourself (without Being a Celebrity)

- and more!

Roughly 1/4 of the chapters are prior blogposts that have done super well - my greatest hits include https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/ and https://www.swyx.io/writing/marketing-yourself/ - and since publishing them I have loads of feedback and rewritten them for the book. The remaining 3/4 are brand new content I have applied for my own career, and market tested the messaging in tweets, talks and podcasts.

There's a launch discount applied to everything on the site; I hope you enjoy it!

---

Side note on tech stack - For the book, I am using https://softcover.io which is a Rails app that Michael Hartl uses to create the Rails tutorial. It's the best tool I found that generates PDF/EPUB/MOBI out of the box with decent customization by exposing LaTeX (and its also FOSS, with a paid option!). For my site I am using Begin.com for hosting and functions, Svelte for components, and Podia for payments. For Audiobook I am using Audacity and my trusty standard issue Egghead.io Instructor Shure mic! Putting this together was a good couple weeks of trial and error - Let me know if I can answer any tech stack questions alongside book questions!

sixhobbits2• 6 years ago

Congratulations!

Did you also consider leanpub?

swyx19• 6 years ago

thank you! yes in fact v0.1.x of the book was published thru leanpub. but i found their build process buggy and nondeterministic - the same exact source material would sometimes succeed in building and sometimes fail, with no stacktrace or helpful error message. The leanpub founders are aware of this, but to save my sanity after a 5 hour session randomly debugging from a distance i had to leave

alextrost• 6 years ago

Congrats Swyx! Picked up my copy, can't wait to dig into it!

swyx19• 6 years ago

thanks so much for the support Alex!

mxbck• 6 years ago

this sounds very interesting and helpful.

humanlion87• 6 years ago

Was 2017 the time you switched careers from finance and learned to code via freeCodeCamp? Or did you switch before 2017 but started learning new stuff (say a new language) on freeCodeCamp in 2017? If it is the former, that's great progress getting to Senior level in less than 3 years! Congrats

swyx19• 6 years ago

short form - i started doing FCC in nights and weekends from Nov 2016 - Mar 2017, then quit and went all in in Jun 2017 and went to an NYC bootcamp to top up my FCC knowledge and also get my first dev job.

here's the long form story - https://medium.com/hackernoon/no-zero-days-my-path-from-code... - ive been harangued over this before so i should be clear that i have done programming prior to starting FCC - just that it was basic self taught data munging stuff, not web dev. i definitely did not start from zero, but i also definitely felt very out of my depth learning the JS/Web stack in 2017 and it took me a year to get to the point where I could credibly apply for a frontend dev job.

thanks!

ddlec2• 6 years ago

This looks like a great resource, swyx. I'm considering buying but would strongly prefer to read a physical book. Do you plan to publish a print version?

swyx19• 6 years ago

thanks! I have no immediate plans but am open to the idea - if only for the fact that itd be freaking cool to give out my own book - any idea what the best way to do a small print run of books would be?

theres the added complication that i'm stuck here in Singapore due to coronavirus, whereas my target audience is all in the US. so i probably shouldnt do shipping myself.

ivan_ah• 6 years ago

Yey softcover. It's the best (only?) way to get real typesetting for print (LaTeX --> PDF), but also modern digital formats (ePub + mobi).

I'm glad to hear more people are using it.

forrestbrazeal2• 6 years ago

Read a version of this book pre-release and loved it!

Distills much of the best advice you can get if you hang out for a few years on HN into an easily shareable package.

Would recommend as a graduation gift or career starter for the new tech person in your life. But also super valuable for folks who have been in the industry as well. The chapter on "Marketing Yourself" contains some reminders that I found really helpful:

- Keep online presence 90% positive

- Be consistent (same profile pic everywhere, etc)

- Be "The Guy" (or non-guy) for a specific, unique, easily-grasped value prop

- Don't chase celebrity or short-term optimizations (posting times, weekly metrics, etc)

swyx19• 6 years ago

thanks a TON forrest! your advocacy and lending your platform to help give a leg up to others in our industry has been super inspiring to me and I hope to do the same in future!!

edit: for those who don't know - forrest does a Cloud Resume Challenge where he helps people get started with a career in the cloud - laying out exact steps and offering his personal network to anyone* who completes them: https://forrestbrazeal.com/2020/04/23/the-cloud-resume-chall...

*he has 2 conditions, listed on the blogpost

PenguinCoder• 6 years ago

There's a lot more than two conditions there, and turns me off trying. Even though, I could probably use the networking.

I mean, kudos to him certainly; who you know is more important than what you know to getting seen and heard. This is a great leg up for the right people.

antoncp• 6 years ago

what is meant by “easily-grasped” in this case, and why is being this type of person good? I.e. why would it be good to have a skill that anyone can easily grasp?

(I’m sure it’s mentioned in the book, but I couldn’t help but ask anyway :])

forrestbrazeal2• 6 years ago

Poor choice of words on my part. Should have said something like "easily-grasped value prop". You want a very short elevator pitch for what you do, that makes it clear what value you provide.

I think of Corey Quinn, whose pitch is "I fix your AWS bill." Short, easily-grasped, specific.

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

They mean

easily-grasped (value prop)

not

(easily-grasped value) prop

Ninjinka• 6 years ago

$39? Pass.

janwillemb• 6 years ago

Please elaborate. Why do you think he needs to ask more for the book? Is it because he poured so much of his time in it?

tydok• 6 years ago

Ask more? The book is expensive. If he lowers the price, say to $10, the sales will probably increase 10x.

gstovall• 6 years ago

It's not hard to recoup your investment if this helps you in your work.

f311a• 6 years ago

No PayPal option?

swyx19• 6 years ago

no but you can email me swyx@hey.com and I'll send you Paypal instructions and add you manually! sorry Podia doesnt provide paypal option :(

asicsp• 6 years ago

You could consider gumroad/leanpub as an additional option if you are not restricted by your current selling options.

torgian• 6 years ago

This is really cool. I will purchase this next month when I have a bit more free money.

swyx19• 6 years ago

i'll prob end the launch discount by then! whats your situation, i can work it out with you, email me swyx@hey dot com

foobar_• 6 years ago

I highly recommend the channel Tech Lead, a youtuber who covers some of the mundane aspects of programming career.

catacombs• 6 years ago

Tech Lead is walking meme who rarely offers good advice, most of which should be taken with a grain of salt. His life is currently a mess: He's divorced and has been recently been accused of doxxing YouTubers and other people who criticize his work.

abd12• 6 years ago

I highly recommend this book and Swyx's other work. He's thorough while also distilling down to the most important bits.

Great book for people that are just starting their coding career but also for those with a good bit of experience. If you're feeling 'stuck', this is a great guide to understand how to advance your career.

'Learn in public' is probably the #1 piece of advice I'd give to anyone in tech. It helps your writing, it builds your network, and it grinds down your ego (because people will certainly let you know when you're wrong). Swyx has been a huge proponent of this, and this whole book is a great kick in the pants to get started.

I'd be shocked if this book doesn't make you >>>10x the amount you spend on it (even counting a healthy hourly rate for reading it).

canadev3• 6 years ago

This book looks interesting. I'd like some advice on whether it will be useful for me.

I've been a professional dev for over ten years and I have a CompSci degree from a respected university. I'm getting paid principal engineering salary for a moderate sized city in the U.S. and I work remotely from Canada in a fairly cheap cost-of-living city at a small company (far from Silicon Valley salary, but pretty damn high for here).

Do you think this book will be useful to me? I want to maintain my career as a developer and grow in skill and salary. I have started blogging about a year ago and I do infrequently but I think my posts are decent. I also am taking the time to learn some stuff like ML and am constantly trying to improve my skills with stuff like PostgreSQL and Go.

swyx19• 6 years ago

you have more experience than i do, so your call on deciding whether you have a superset on this content. all i can offer is, if you do choose to check it out and decide it is not for you, I will honor your refund request.

Good luck! I am certainly always on the side of developers working on themselves.

miguendes• 6 years ago

Looks very interesting, even tough I'm not new in the industry. So I'm interested in buying and if like it I'd like to upgrade the package. Is it possible just by paying the difference? I couldn't find this in the FAQ

swyx19• 6 years ago

hello! Podia does allow "upsells" and I tried to do everything right to configure it such that you just pay the difference if you do. however i havent run thru this userflow myself. if you do wanna upgrade later and have trouble just ping me, i'll sort you out manually

claudiulodro2• 6 years ago

Please don't take this the wrong way; I am genuinely curious. As far as I can tell, you've been a professional developer for approximately 2 years. What qualifies you to instruct people how to manage their dev career, let alone charge $40+ for the advice?

MivLives• 6 years ago

I'm also curious about this, and interested in a review from someone who has been in the field longer to see how much the advice here rings true. 40 dollars isn't a huge ask for a book, but it's above an impulse buy.

[edit] Rearranged some words for clarity

Swizec3• 6 years ago

Swyx is legit. The speed at which he established himself as an authority in the React/Javascript world is hella impressive

And he’s fresh enough that his advice isn’t enbittered and grizzled yet.

acemarke5• 6 years ago

As a bystander but friend of Shawn's, I can say that over the last few years he has demonstrated an incredible ability to quickly learn and master concepts, then pass that information on to others.

I've seen him go from someone who didn't know anything about web dev at all, to a master of what's going on with React and its ecosystem. He's added expertise on Svelte and other tools as well.

Shawn excels at a lot of "big picture analysis" type thinking (which makes sense given his prior financial background), and I always find his comments and presentations insightful and highly informative.

I haven't yet had time to read through this new book due to my own tasks, but based on the blog posts I've seen him write leading up to this, and the preview material he's tweeted, I have full confidence that this book is going to be an excellent resource for other developers.

As for the price, Shawn's clearly put a lot of time and effort into writing this. If you have questions about his ability to do so and the likely quality, I'd encourage you to read through some of his blog posts to get a sense of how he writes:

https://www.swyx.io/writing/

sokoloff• 6 years ago

I think GP's point is that I would be similarly skeptical of taking parenting advice "from diapers to diplomas" from someone who hadn't yet had their first-born blow out a birthday candle, regardless of how well-edited or how much effort they put into publishing that advice.

To me, it's not about the $40; it's about advice on "the full journey from Code Newbie to Senior Developer" from someone who is probably much closer to the former than the latter.

kamaal• 6 years ago

Haven't read the book, but by reading the table of contents, it does look like it is essays on commonly known topics to most programmers.

Stuff like reading books, training frequently, exposure to Machiavellian strategies, perennial interview practice, side projects etc is already known to most programmers who are aware and actively seeking improvement.

One thing that I like to see most programmers pay importance to in the future is physical fitness and rest. Mental health would also be a good topic to add. We are a profession where every one wants to win spectacularly or die trying. Or we just over eat and sit our excercise-less bodies to death.

A comprehensive programmer nerd's guide to exercise, rest and mental health would be something I'd be interested in reading.

swyx19• 6 years ago

i agree! (the final chapter is basically what you said here) unfortunately i need to learn that too before i can write it.

swyx19• 6 years ago

i think its a fair question and you've been very polite about it :)

I basically deal with it by being super open about it (it's pretty much the first thing anyone knows about me) and letting people decide if they still want to read me or not. enough do. in a free market, that's plenty.

so the question then becomes: what confidence do I have in what I think I know? it comes from 3 places:

- Empirical foundation: study and read others. this book has 1419 external links and quotes to advice from people way more credible and established than me. I provide curation and context.

- Theoretical foundation: I do my best to ensure what i see in real life is backed up by indisputable logical/psychological axioms. This is important for replicability.

- Personal Experience: I apply what I learn to myself.

Every weakness can be a strength (funny enough, i spend a whole chapter talking about this). In my case, i've basically made a career out of putting out what i learn as i learn it, before i'm an expert, with the responsible disclaimer that I am not an expert but I do put a ton of work into thinking and research. it's the opposite of "fake it til you make it", its being real that you havent made it yet but you do not let that stop you trying. I am at the exact point where my voice and perspective on things (being a recent beginner) let me explain things to beginners in ways that experts can't.

Yes it's uncomfortable af. But you see tremendous growth when you are both intellectually honest and doggedly persistent at this.

As I wrote this book I was also overcome with this personal insight - me 5 years from now would probably not pick this book to write. I would be interested in different things, different challenges. This is pretty much the only time I would ever write a junior-dev-to-senior-dev book: right after having done it.

I suspect this is why so few junior-dev-to-senior-dev books exist - people wait too long, and then by the time they feel qualified to write a book, they care more about management or architecture or what have you.

short answer: no i don't feel very qualified right now. i do intend to update this for a few years. how long until i am qualified? we shall see.

claudiulodro2• 6 years ago

Thanks for clarifying. I think I will give it a read, even if just to see what your fresh perspective looks like. The personal branding stuff sounds very interesting and useful also.

EDIT: I would like to note that the IMHO most mentally and technically difficult part of a developer career is maintaining the same mission-critical legacy codebase for years at a time. That's not something I really expect to get a lot of insight around from this book and your personal experience, but I'm also not sure what exactly advice around that problem would look like (probably just the tried-and-true military motto of "embrace the suck"). Either way, just my 2 cents about coding careers.

stephc_int132• 6 years ago

All of this seems kinda legit, learning and be open and using both your experiences and your interactions with others to fix or reinforce your assumptions, but this is not what people usually expect to find in a book...

I still have the feeling that there is a bit of greed here, trying to find shortcuts, this is not blatantly wrong but I have the intuition that this is a potentially harmful mindset, not unlike the Move Fast and Break Things mindset.

maps72• 6 years ago

Agreed. If the author had 40 years experience I would pay attention but 2 years experience is nothing. Maybe it should be sold as "what to expect in the first 2 years of your career".

freewilly10402• 6 years ago

And even then the advice would be worth little compared to more experienced people

odshoifsdhfs6• 6 years ago

Because that is what sells now.

Write a book for Packt on X you are learning as you go => Leading expert in X and charge 100USD/hour

Write a bunch of blog spam on X, a lot of it wrong => Leading expert in X and charge 100USD/hour

Create a bunch of projects that have more bugs than Swiss cheese has holes => Leading expert in X and charge 100USD/hour

There is a story today here that says GitHub is the Instagram of programming, and more and more I agree. Technical knowledge has been trumped by marketing. You are only someone if you have a blog/github profile/stackoverflow with more than 1M+ points.

And then people wonder why software is so shitty now days, why a todo list in React makes any laptop run out of battery in 50 minutes (not attacking React, just how beginners use it).

agustif• 6 years ago

So if we accept this as baseline reality then what do we do?

gdavid• 6 years ago

It’s crazy to think how much of a negative effect social media and advertising have had on the world ...

pc862• 6 years ago

What qualifies you to instruct people how to manage their dev career

Well, absolutely nothing, and it's a shame to see people (I have to imagine mostly college interns and fresh grads who already fancy themselves as "mid-level" developers) waste money on this nonsense.

Unfortunately this is what happens when you see job advertisements requiring "Senior Developers" and specifying 5 years of total work experience. In no other industry can you be a 27 year old and be anything other than junior-to-mid. I say this as someone who was a senior developer in my late 20's, and you don't know anything in your late 20's.

But I suppose if you're a senior developer after a couple years, what's to say you can't advise people on their careers when you haven't even made it through a Presidential election?

treetide2• 6 years ago

About the $40+ for the advice part - seriously, that is a few hours of developer salary. Compared to the few days it would take reading, it is essentially nothing.

Now the question is, investing those few days total saves you more worries. And doesn't derail you. That's hard to evaluate, and I don't attempt to. But for information, $40 is cheap.

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

? A few minutes.

TurboHaskal• 6 years ago

I've just read the table of contents and I think I want to get off this industry.

swyx19• 6 years ago

i'm sorry i made you feel that way. this is far from the only valid perspective on the industry and I'd be interested in reading what you prefer/enjoy instead.

quicklime• 6 years ago

The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career

I'm a little triggered by this headline. I understand what it means, and I agree there's some truth to it. It can be good advice when given to developers who haven't yet figured out that their job is not exclusively to write code.

But in my company (which is a big non-tech corporate) I've noticed that a similar phrase often gets used by non-technical people to belittle the work that software developers do. The exact wording varies, but the sentiment is basically that technical problems are easy, and can safely be outsourced to the lowest bidder, as long as there's a good Project Manager who can enforce the right methodology and processes. It's the problems that require "soft" skills that are difficult - these are the kind that Thought Leaders and Influencers work on - and we need to pay a premium for people who can solve these problems.

In reality, technical and non-technical problems are both difficult in their own ways, and both occupy a space that ranges from trivial to impossible.

In terms of career advice, I'd really suggest not perpetuating this myth. One of the tactics that the book lists is "marketing yourself", and repeating the idea that coding is easy (especially to non-technical people) undermines your career and that of your technical colleagues.

bluntfang2• 6 years ago

Coding isn't the hard part of your job, it's convincing people that outsourcing isn't going to result in good outcomes. The reason why they won't result in good outcomes:

* maintenance is hard

* writing quality code is hard

* CI/CD is hard

* requirements gathering is hard

etc.

canadev3• 6 years ago

Sometimes coding is hard in and of itself.

gautamdivgi• 6 years ago

How much success have you had? Not trying to be snarky - but the problem in corporates is there are no "lag indicators" of success. The success of a manager is defined as getting to a specific cost structure, there is no measure if that cost structure delivers the results. And in a lot of big corporations what's good for your career and what's good for the company may not be the same thing.

canadev3• 6 years ago

I agree, and I'm glad I don't work at a place where coding is considered easy work.

WrtCdEvrydy3• 6 years ago

To be honest, the technical problems are the easy thing in most companies since they just need a simple CRUD app and anything you do will be magic to most people regardless.

The politics are the difficult part of most work in this industry. Everyone has an agenda (which is not a bad thing) and serving multiple agendas will make your technical problems even worse.

foota• 6 years ago

Just because something (a simple CRUD app) seems simple to you, doesn't mean it'll be easy for everyone, in particular if you don't know what the quick ways are of doing it.

sharadov• 6 years ago

Depends where you work, if it's a dinky ecommerce site with no scalability issues, then coding is not a problem. But if it's a real product company with AI/ML engineering problems, then coding definitely is.

kubanczyk• 6 years ago

The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career

The Coding will sometimes be the hardest part of a Coding Career.

Since people are throwing around authoritatively-sounding statements here, anyone interested is cordially invited to use mine.

adamsea• 6 years ago

I dunno. Coding is the easiest part of programming, in a sense.

The challenges in programming aren't literally "writing code", once you achieve a certain degree of facility with the language and libraries you are using.

The challenge is, of course, solving the problem - doing the intellectual work.

I get that people often say "writing code" and also mean the intellectual work of programming / CS / software engineering (whichever may be appropriate), but I really don't think that's accurate.

Hope that makes sense and isn't pressing too fine a point on it.

king_magic• 6 years ago

We've got to get away from calling everything "coding" and everyone "coders".

lukeholder• 6 years ago

It looks like a lot of friends with prepared comments for this launch in here.

acemarke5• 6 years ago

I can confirm that my own comment above was 100% spontaneous.

That said, Shawn has been writing this book in public, so anyone who's been following him does know that he was about to launch.

maps72• 6 years ago

I also got a strong sense of this. One comment is promoting the author but the person making the comment hasn't actually read the book.

acemarke5• 6 years ago

Yes, because I know the quality of content that Shawn creates.

cambalache3• 6 years ago

It feels like a product hunt launch. Going downhill!!! my dear Hacker News.

kingkongjaffa• 6 years ago

There's a whole micro-cosm of 'tech-twitter' guru's of which this guy is one of them.

They spend their whole time selling shovels.

adgaf• 6 years ago

I asked on twitter privately if swyx the writer can pass on a discount code as I am in between jobs, and due to the USD exchange rate it works out quite expensive in my home country and most kindle downloads have been about 1/4 of the price of this book. He gave a very curt reply, and when I went to check out the book again it had actually gone up from 40 usd to 59 usd, with 3 tiers of pricing where for 99 usd or 249 usd u get extra things like audiobooks and 'future courses'. I understand he came from a finance background that may have influenced his behaviour, but considering his target audience would be junior developers who don't earn that much especially outside USA, it feels quite exploitative especially during covid-19 times.

itqwertz• 6 years ago

I typically don’t trust anyone who uses the word “coding”.

swyx19• 6 years ago

naming is hard... so the background on this is that the book was originally called "Cracking the Coding Career" for the alliteration and for the mirror with "Cracking the Coding Interview". I nearly even shipped with that name - until Gayle McDowell got in touch and said this would break her trademark. So I had to tweak it. I considered maybe a dozen other names but believe it or not they were worse :(

jayrice257• 6 years ago

Naming is hard when you have to rely on marketing and gimmicks to sell an idea instead of content... like this "book"

closeparen• 6 years ago

Gayle's usage, "coding interview," specifies which part of the interview loop her book focuses on. Of course there are many other attributes and skills assessed in an interview loop: design, architecture, debugging, technical communication, experience, domain knowledge, leadership, etc.

The usage of "coding" with respect to the job often comes off as a polemic against those other facets. Sometimes this is what you want! Maybe you're breaking free of all that architecture astronomy and faux-agile BS to just build stuff. Maybe you're differentiating yourself from your senior colleagues who seem to write only documents. Maybe you want to hire someone to shut up and type, not pester you about tech debt. But these are all fighting words.

It gets old when people pick up this usage and repeat it without even meaning it.

stephc_int132• 6 years ago

I am frankly a bit tired of this kind of bait-clicky lessons from people with a very thin track record. (This is way too frequent on Youtube these days)

I'd be more interested in the insight someone like Fabrice Bellard gained during his coding career, especially if we're talking about productivity or impact.

freewilly10402• 6 years ago

A lot of the early positive comments in this thread feel astroturfed

mbo• 6 years ago

I feel the same way. For a place as exceedingly cynical as Hackernews, a lot of the comments here feel artificial.

cambalache3• 6 years ago

This whole thread is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with this industry.

elliotbnvl• 6 years ago

Congrats on the launch, Shawn!

I'm frustrated and saddened by the amount of negative comments here from doubters, burnt out folks, and cynical engineers. I want to weigh in with a positive perspective.

I've been following Shawn for a while now (from a distance) and I have to say, seeing his name pop up in more and more places has certainly been an intriguing experience. He went from being nobody a few years ago to being somebody worth listening to very quickly.

He's built up a lot of good will with me just from what he's posted that is freely available, so it's a little frustrating to see other people bashing / looking for problems as soon as he releases something with a price tag. I personally have benefited a lot from his "learn in public" approach (more from his example than from his advice!!) and have had multiple posts hit the front page of HN by "learning in public", from which I've learned further (it's a positive feedback loop).

Full discloser, I haven't read this book, but the interesting thing is that he's only recently started monetizing this exposure. That rings true to me of somebody who knows what they're doing and has real value to bring to the table.

For people who are saying "But he doesn't have enough experience," bear in mind that this book has ~1400 references to other peoples' experience. I trust that way more than I do one person's singular viewpoint, even if that is backed up by 40 years' worth of experience.

Also, before anybody tries to call me out – this is a 100% spontaneous response and I had no idea Shawn's book was out until I saw this post on the front page of HN.

dajohnson89• 6 years ago

anybody else notice the gradually shifting background color? is my monitor sketching out?

swyx19• 6 years ago

hey! that was a (bad) design decision by me. I thought itd be cool. i was wrong. i've swapped out the design now and apologize, lesson learned!

geochronology• 6 years ago

I'm curious enough about some of the content in this book that I'd consider reading it if the price was cheaper (maybe $10-15 or so).

Unfortunately this book seems too all-over-the-map to be particularly useful to where I'm at in my own coding career: about 18 months into it.

There are two pieces to this book if I read the marketing pages correctly: * First, the overplayed trope of "How to get hired as a Pr0gRaMmar!!!1" -- a cottage industry nearly as large as the field of engineering itself * Second, the less-played trope of, "Here are some actionable ways to develop your career path under the severe time constraints that an engineering career will present you with"

If this text were more exclusively drilled down into the second topic rather than the first, I'd probably make the purchase.

However, I don't feel like spending time reading through a lot of things that I either already know, or that don't apply to me.

mellosouls2• 6 years ago

The book may be an excellent resource, but this appears to be just an advert - are there free examples you can point us to?

It would be better to link directly to that page I think.

swyx19• 6 years ago

hi! - there wasn't - this is a result of my noobyness doing this - but now there is! i've put up 4 chapters for you to evaluate - no email needed. https://www.learninpublic.org/#learn-more

mellosouls2• 6 years ago

Thank you

antonzabirko2• 6 years ago

Any free version I can audit? Not convinced this is worth the money since you have 2 years of experience, but I am willing to invest some time to prove myself wrong.

swyx19• 6 years ago

hi Anton - there wasn't - but now there is! i've put up 4 chapters for you to evaluate - no email needed. https://www.learninpublic.org/#learn-more

antonzabirko2• 6 years ago

treetide2• 6 years ago

Shameless plug: my work-in-progress book Programming Without Anxiety [0] might be interesting for you. It got a bit of scope creep which I'll have to cut back on, but I'm pretty enthusiastic about the content so far.

[0] https://treetide.com/book/programming-without-anxiety.html

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

This page pegs my CPU. Flagged for that reason.

Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

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