I know a lot of you guys are starting out in your software developer programming careers, and you want to get up there you want to get up to the upper echelon.
So today, I thought I would record a video on how you can become a good programmer a good one.
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Transcript Of The Video
John Sonmez: Hey guys, John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com. Today, I thought I would record a video on how you can become a good programmer. A good one. Not a bad one.
If you guys are just joining the first time, I'm John from simpleprogrammer.com and shall I teach you the soft skills you need to become a better software developer and a better human being. Click the link below to subscribe, and then click the link below also to buy my soft skills book if you haven't, The Software Developer's Life Manual. I've actually reprinted this book as I have the full rights on this book, and I think you'll find it pretty useful.
So, anyway, what we're going to talk about today is what it takes to become a good software developer, right? A good programmer. And you know what you should do if you're starting out in this career. Yeah. So what you should do is a couple of things. Okay. So the biggest thing that I could tell you for you guys that are wanting to climb up the ladder is that you need to be constantly reading, all right? You should be constantly reading some kind of software development book. Right. I remember when I was really serious and trying to really gain knowledge and up my skills, I would do about two books a month. Okay. I read a lot more books than that per month now, but not software development books, obviously, but it's really important to be constantly reading, constantly immersing yourself, not just in books, but also blogs. Okay. YouTube channels, right. Constantly be immersed in technology, know what's going on and learning and studying. Okay. That's really, really important. That's like number one. Okay.
The next thing I would say is that you need to also, and this one is really critical, not just me learning this stuff, but teaching it to other people, being a mentor. All right. One of the biggest things that really advanced my career more than anything else, aside from becoming like popular with my blog and all this stuff, was mentoring others. Right. So I would, at most of my software development jobs, I didn't know what I was doing. Okay. But I would go over to someone else's desk and help them with their work. And I would help all kinds of people. I was kind of the go-to guy for questions. I would like figure out someone's problem, like the solution to their problem. And that exposed me to a high degree of problems and just by having all those problems that I was encountering… Whereas the average developer that's just working by themselves, they just encounter the problems that they're working with. Okay. But by being exposed to all the problems that all the other developers were having and being that go-to guy, I quickly learned a lot more than I would if I were just doing my own thing. All right. So that's number two. All right?
The third one, which kind of goes back to the first one is to be focused on what you're learning. Okay. So don't just learn a bunch of things, right? I used to think that learning 10 programming languages would be awesome. Okay. I ended up learning more than 10 programming languages. Okay. But what really helped me was going deep with one particular programming language, like learning things in depth. So instead of spreading out and reading about all these different things and watching some [inaudible 00:02:59] videos or lynda.com videos or whatever it is on all these different topics… Instead become an expert in one thing. In fact, with all my coaching clients, right. My coaching clients that pay me to help them. Okay. In fact, I've got a good one for you here. I want to show you a guy that became really, really successful where he actually ended up leaving a software development job. I have to brag about my, one of my coaching clients here. Let me bring it up.
Okay. So DAP University, okay. Look at… He's got 129,000 subscribers on his channel now. Okay. Gregory. And he's making a lot of money. I'm not going to talk about his personal finances. But what he does is he teaches developers to become blockchain developers, right. He focuses on blockchain development and because he focused on that and became the expert in this, and it basically in billing dApps, and Ethereum, he's been able to build a huge business for himself. I mean, he could, if he were to try to get a job, I mean, he could get a job making a ridiculous amount of money. He doesn't need to though because he makes way more money with his own business. So if you want to really become good as a software developer, you got to really specialize in something. You got to pick something, right. And you can start a blog, start teaching other people. Start a YouTube channel. That's fine. You don't even have to, right, you can just learn on your own. So that's going to help you quite a bit. All right.
The last thing I'd say about leveling up as a programmer, really becoming a good programmer is that you have to constantly be creating things yourself. Right? So any good developer, right, if I'm interviewing someone for a software development job, I'm asking them what side projects that they're working on. It's one of those things that it just tells me. If you're working on something on the side, I know that you're constantly learning and developing your skills and you have a passion for it. Now that doesn't mean that you have to, some people are like, “Well, that kind of discriminates against people that are like single parents and they don't have time or programming's not their whole life. True, true. But if you want to become a really good developer, you're going to become that way by putting more and more time into the work and really loving the work. And so that's what I would recommend.
If you guys haven't already, like I said, check out Soft Skills, Soft Developer's Life Manual, click the subscribe button and I will be back next week with new video.