In 2011, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book in which he maintained that achieving world-class status in any field takes 10,000 hours of practice. If you practice a craft for 40 hours a week, that maps up to 250 weeks. If you assume each year has 52 weeks (it’s a bit messier with things like leap…
Ken Mazaika
If you asked a senior developer the difference between a software engineer and a developer, you’d probably be met with a confused face. Here’s the technical definition of both: A software engineer is someone who builds (engineers) software. This software could be desktop programs like Spotify or Photoshop, or mobile and web applications (like Facebook,…
Ken Mazaika
I get it. We’ve all heard the hype. JavaScript is the future! The in-demand developers of tomorrow are JavaScript first! Look at this fancy graph about percentages of Google searches, or the amount of growth in the community! Just because an idea is trendy doesn’t mean it’s a good one. The thought that JavaScript is…
Ken Mazaika
Here’s the secret: in the context of the workplace, you can’t trust a word that comes out of a programmer’s mouth. Programmers lie all the time. Programmers lie like it’s their job. But it’s not their fault, it’s just part of the process of building software on a team. Lies like, “my code doesn’t have…
Ken Mazaika
In most programming jobs, you’re going to be working and collaborating as a team – and many of the practices you’ll pick up when coding on projects by yourself will fall apart when you start working with other people. Most teams of developers have established certain ways of working with one another. Some people call…
Ken Mazaika
If you, like me, became a software engineer before the Internet was at scale— back in the good-old-days when AOL was spamming our physical mailboxes with CDs — you may not appreciate how becoming a software developer has dramatically changed. Although the Internet has made our lives collectively easier, the dynamic of learning to program is…
Ken Mazaika