JONATHAN MORALES "LLC"
LARGO, FLORIDA

. I’ve used these three steps to do everything from Painting to Music Making to Rock Climbing. I’d say they’re more like “stages” than steps, and you’ll find yourself iterating through them repeatedly as you master a given role or skill. . If you’re looking to change roles, you need to immerse yourself in that new role in order to get a guaranteed drip feed of critical industry lingo and terminology. Now bear with me, you’re probably thinking “gee that’s obvious”. This is all part of avoiding the “car crash interview” and it’s part of surveying the lands and getting an idea of what are the unknown-unknowns. The great part is, you are probably already performing this step without even thinking about it. If so, congrats! You’re already 1 for 3! The key to immersion is to become a part of the environments which developers do. Hang out on industry blogs, find a local meetup or free conference, lurk in a development Slack channel, hangout on the Stack Exchange Software Engineering Channel, or even scan through Reddit’s many developer forums. You want to become familiar and used to the common terminology you’re going to initially encounter. Learning the lingo, even at a surface level, helps to improve your confidence and prime your mind for better understanding when you are ready to engage those topics fully in the future. If I were to say Having fresh code in your GitHub accomplishes several things. First, it proves you’re serious about wanting to be a developer. Second, it shows that you have at least a basic understanding of the most popular code repository on the planet. Third, it will be your own personal motivation. Ask any coder and they will tell you that starting a new project can be tricky but once it gets going, you’ll end up coding into the wee hours of the morning as you think of new features and ways to optimize, refactor and improve your code. Once that happens (if it hasn’t already), you will have ignited an insatiable desire to develop ever more performant and elegant code — the learning will come as a byproduct.