Show HN: 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers – New Book | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers – New Book

14habits.com

154 pointszenorocha55 comments

Hello HN friends!

I never thought I'd say this, but - yes - I just published a book!

14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers is now available for everyone.

It's everything I know about productivity, tech career, and side projects into one package. I spent 3 months writing this, 1 month working on the launch, and 10+ years living these ideas.

To be honest, I never wanted to write a book, but I believe that being a developer is more than knowing the hottest tools.

You can learn the most popular frameworks, use the best programming languages, and work at the biggest tech companies, but if you cultivate bad habits, it will be hard for you to become a top developer.

Because of that, I decided to reach out to the best developers I know and ask them tips on how to be more productive.

I went after tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Powerful startups such as Spotify, GoDaddy, and Shopify. All the way to established organizations such as Citibank and The New York Times.

This book is a collection of valuable learnings not only from me but from experienced programmers from all over the world.

I hope you like it :)

Let me know if you have any questions! I'm here to answer every single one of them.

I appreciate you putting up the first chapter!

No worries. I saw some people doing that and putting email walls to get it. I think this is much better. Just click, download it, and get a sense of it before making a purchase decision.

The lack of email walls was so refreshing. I expected an ugly form to show up, and was willing to fill it out. But instead, I was greeted with the actual download - just like that.

I don't know what the opposite of Cognitive Dissonance is called, but now I know what it feels like.

That's so nice to hear!

3 months seems like very little time to write a book. How come you chose a book vs a series of blog posts?

Looks good, but you might want to get a little editing help just to sharpen up the language - a liberal arts major would help fix various little things quite quickly I suspect.

E.g. "I spoke in [more than a hundred conferences]" - I think "I spoke at" is better. However, my background is UK English so perhaps this is an Americanism.

Next para:

"I was fortunate enough to be in contact with some of the best software engineers in the industry, but I also met a lot of programmers who are still doing the same thing for many years."

"I was fortunate enough to come into contact with some of the best software engineers in the industry, but I also met a lot of programmers who just spent many years repeating the same thing."

Thanks for sharing the first chapter!

The graphics are quite rough and too large - the actual amount of text per page on the PDF is very low. This compounds the feeling of the text itself feeling very surface level.

> Instead, we should practice JOMO (the joy of missing out), which is mostly about being happy and content with what you already know.

Here you introduce a new concept and never mention it again. Instead of paving a road to drive on in the next few paragraphs, you immediately introduce a plethora of heavyweight ideas including the practice of saying no and of noise discrimination.

All of these points are good ones, but because they're passed over so quickly with no explanation it's going to be hard for someone who isn't familar with them to unpack them and extract learnings.

Ohh interesting. Thanks for sharing that feedback @vorpalhex!

I think it would be nice to see a TOC or something similar on the main page. I found the TOC by looking at the gumroad link and going through the slide show.

Minor nitpick: I feel like the links on all those company icons is unnecessary (alt text on hover would be fine).

Interestingly taking the first letter of each company leads to the acronym - GAGMASS.. A bit catchier than FANG :)

Hey @fouc, thanks for the feedback.

I agree the links on all those company icons is unnecessary. I just put it over there in case people didn't know the logo.

About the TOC, I believe you might have missed that. It's on the "What's inside?" section of the site.

GAGMASS - that's funny :P

I think once I saw the list of people I assumed I was near the end of the webpage, and didn't keep looking past it. Perhaps you could move some other things above that list.

FWIW there's 9 upvotes on my earlier post so maybe that means 8 other people had the same issue as me, not sure.

Disclaimer: I am writing a book on the same topic (nevertheless it will be quite different from the content perspective).

I don't want to comment much on the book because of ^ but there is something that I found a little bit off putting for me.

It is the obsession with American big tech (the biggest tech companies and well known startups). The book suggests that all such companies have it figured out, that all engineers working there are the most productive and best in the industry. I personally don't believe it and I am not sure why a productivity book should be so heavily based around it.

As an example take this question from the book "What's so special about individuals who create the most used applications in the world?" I really really just want to answer "Nothing".

Anyways there goes my little rant... Definitely congrats on publishing a book, it is a struggle!

Hey @petr25102018, that's a great topic, I'm glad you brought that up.

When I was starting my career, I always looked at those companies as dream jobs. The amazing offices, the culture, everything was eye-catching.

As I started to get older and more experienced, I noticed that those companies are not that special. They have issues, problems, and conflicts like any other company. Don't get me wrong, those companies are still amazing and their impact is undeniable.

I see this like sports. There are amazing teams out there, but the ones with more capital are able to go after the best players in the market. This doesn't mean that small teams don't have talented players.

The only reason why I invited those individuals is because they are the most talented programmers I know. I'm pretty sure there are amazing people working on smaller companies, but when I looked at my past co-workers and developers from my circle of friends, those were the ones I wanted to hear more from.

Anyways, hopefully this will show a little bit more about my decision making process.

Good luck on your book! I'm excited to take a look, is there any pre-sale already?

I think it is good that you have interviewed people that you know and I definitely see the branding appeal of having some big names around. It is just some of the wording in the book could be better, especially since the topic is productivity (not a career success where the argument is definitely stronger).

I am not selling the book yet, I have just a sign up page for now (https://efficientdeveloper.com). My take will be more about software development as a whole rather than just the productivity part, with productivity being just an angle of what I will cover in the book.

because it's what sells :shrug:

as a fellow book author tho... you bet I went after big names for my testimonials.

It reminds me of Coders at Work: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coders_at_work

That looks like a super nice book. Thanks for sharing!

There is also "Programmers at work", much older but also a great read from the 80s

https://www.amazon.com/Programmers-work-Interviews-Susan-Lam...

Woooooow!

This is a must read, and I’d argue it has a very different conclusion on programmers. They are all very different.

I can't believe I never seen that. I'll definitely check it out. Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich - those guys are my heros!

I've read it 10 years ago. The only thing I remember is that the best programmers use printf to debug :-)

Thanks, bought the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coders_at_work

Thank you for this, Zeno!

I read the sample chapter and enjoyed it so much, I bought the book on gumroad. But ONE BIG NIT: the sample chapter is pdf, but the book is not. Can you please provide me a pdf of the full book? Email on my profile.

Looking forward to reading the rest and providing feedback.

I hope you sell a bunch of books and write some more :-)

Hey @edw519, I chose to do the sample as PDF because it's more accessible, but the book itself is only on .epub and .mobi so far. I'll take a look into converting it to PDF.

Thanks you so much!

One or two open source success stories (ie. Adam Wathan with Tailwind CSS, Taylor Otwell with Laravel) would have sealed this for me, seems a little too corporate and other than Andy I don't know most of these people. My 2 cents, sample chapter was interesting.

Considering a recent thread on HN regarding mixing up personal time and company duties I'd love to have the gist beforehand of what would be discussed inside chapters "Your 9-to-5 Is Not Enough" and "Side Projects" as the TOC falls short a tiny bit.

Hey @caiobegotti, those are definitely one of the best chapters in the book. Feel free to purchase it on Gumroad and if you don't think it's not useful, just send me an email to zeno@14habits.com and I'll refund you right away.

I think what the GP is suggesting is that having those items on the TOC without further explanation makes it look like this book will insist that in order to be a highly productive developer you should have a poor work life balance. Which is nonsense at best and harmful at worst.

I understand your point, but I don't think we should judge any book by the TOC. Those topics are there as a reference and as a way to draw people's attention to each chapter. In order to fully understand, we need to dive deeper into them.

Great effort. I like the snippets from different developers in-context, instead of showing the entire interview in one place.

Why did you quote Zig Zigler? Seems a little out of place. Also, I felt that the first chapter needs to be more compelling - but maybe that's just me.

That's great! I'm glad you liked that interview format.

On every chapter, there's a quote. This particular one has a Zig Zigler quote because it matches pretty well with the content of the chapter.

Thanks, I'm currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. This looks like a good complement to it.

That's an amazing book indeed. I think you will like this one!

Interesting concepts, given the book a purchase and will take a look this week.

That's great to hear! I would love to hear your thoughts about it. Feel free to email me at zeno@14habits.com

Bought it! Looking forward to read it

Thank you SO much! I can't wait to hear your opinions about it

purchased it, looking forward to reading it later

Thanks @salilpn12, let me know what you think about it!

Just finished reading the whole book and it is full of golden nuggets. I'm stuck in an area of life where I needed this. Would recommend it to everyone. Is it fine if I write a blog based on book review(#TODO Habit 3), with credits and a link to your book?

More spam on HN. Mods please remove this post. They are clearly promoting their book.

Hey @pl0x, the reason why I wrote this book is to help people in their tech careers. Sorry if I broke some rule or anything. I thought that it would be nice to get some feedback about the first chapter and the site.

What's wrong with that, as opposed to promoting your app?

its literally marked as "Show HN"

It's ok to make a Show HN out of a book, as long as it's a real book and users can 'try it out' by reading part of it for free.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com