Does this sound familiar to you?
If you are a software developer trying to get your technical skills to the next level, you are probably familiar with this:
- You try to define a path for your technical growth, but you lack a clear direction and don’t know how to progress
- You are confused by the huge amount of information out there and simply don’t know what to do next
- You signed up to some online courses on Udemy never finished them because you got stuck or they simply don't work out for you
- Due to the gap in your technical skills, you struggle to build features on your own and constantly need help from senior developers
- You keep hearing that you need to learn functional programming, testing or design patterns from all the tech influencers out there...
If you are like most software developers, you probably experience these situations again and again.
And there is a reason for that:
You lack a clear plan in your technical growth.
You lack a defined process that guides your learning and tells you exactly what you need to learn next, no matter what is the latest tech trend, no matter in what phase you find yourself as a developer or the company you work for.
Think about it: How many times do you feel lost and confused when working on your technical skills just because you simply had no clear plan?
If you really want to realise your full potential as a software developer you must build a system around your technical growth.
Why is this so important?
Here is the thing: not having a clear technical learning plan is the main reason most software developers take years to grow their skills and get stuck in junior positions or mediocre jobs - simply because not having a process forces them to improvise in their learning (so they aimlessly drift around, procrastinate and ultimately quit).
How are you supposed to get to the next level if you are improvising all the time?
It is then crucial for you to build a clear learning plan so you can finally reach seniority in your technical stack, become a professional developer.
Technical excellence is the backbone of your dev career. It will allow you to get promoted faster, get better positions or directly jump into freelancing yourself.
Here is the solution you need:
For the last 12 months I helped 90+ software developers like you reach technical excellence, I set up this 3 steps system to build a clear learning plan so you become an expert software developer in your tech stack of choice.
The 3 crucial steps to build a bulletproof learning plan for your technical development:
Step 1 - Become an expert in your tech stack.
Aim to become the “go-to” person for that particular technology in your team. What is the programming language/framework you work with the most so far? Which topics in that programming language do you feel you are lacking? Make an honest assessment of your skills. Your job will only give you exposure to certain topics, this is why it is crucial that you identify and develop the missing ones. Hint: if you are a web developer, that’s most likely JavaScript(more on this in a future article).
If you skip this step and decide to become a “jack of all trades” your ability to work independently will be seriously limited.
Step 2 - Make best practices & software design principles a habit
This step is crucial particularly for junior/mid-level developers. To move into the senior area and beyond, you need to be able to abstract beyond implementation details. Here, you need to leverage on all the existing best practices that the software industry has developed over the years to deal with recurring problems. This means object-oriented programming, SOLID principles and design patterns. Be careful, this is a lot! As a rule of thumb, focus on the top 3 in each category and you will do just fine.
Understand that the “engineering part” in your job title comes from your ability to measure the pros and cons of your solutions.
That is your ability to design solutions between countless constraints the real world puts on our software.
Step 3 - Understand the software development lifecycle
The final step, but one that will multiply your abilities. Learn what happens to your code after you finish building a certain feature. How does it get built, deployed and shipped to the user? What does CI/CD really mean? What is a deployment pipeline and how can you build one? Being able to ship and deploy your own code will help you connect the dots.
Here, you will understand the real price of defects, and why testing is so crucial. Again, there are endless courses on this topic. Follow the Pareto principle, pick one continuous delivery platform and one cloud provider (most likely AWS).
A good understanding of the cloud will allow you to ship software faster, assist QA engineers better and deliver better software faster. It will also allow you to answer tricky interview questions when the moment comes.
That’s it - there is nothing else you need to achieve technical excellence as a developer.
This is why those 3 steps solve your problem
It is actually obvious:
Once you are an expert in your technology stack, understand best practices and have a feeling for how to ship software, you become a top software engineer. This will automatically boost your performance, get you noticed and put you in line for a promotion.
I have successfully used this system with other software developers and they are constantly reaching results. Recently one of our clients succeeded just like that and went from being the junior dev of the team to gain more responsibility and a promotion.
If you read this article, then I assume that you are also an ambitious software developer looking to reach technical excellence right now so you can be more confident in your skills, get more responsibility and better growth opportunities,
Well if that applies to you, then you would certainly benefit from implementing the 3 steps I have just shown you to become a top software developer.
Regardless - we both know that reading a simple article on software development will not bring you the results you want.
If you want results immediately, then I have a suggestion for you: get in touch with my team. You can apply for a FREE initial consultation where we will go over the details of each step via Zoom.
In this call, me or one of my colleagues will give you every single step that we go through with our clients once they book our program to fast track their growth as a developer.
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