brunojppb

One thing that worked well for me was to look for a mentor early on. Try to find someone experienced in the field that could lead you through your career, recommend books and give you feedback. Two things that happened to me while following this:

1. I was learning much quicker and way more valuable content than my peers during university. I think it was mainly because I was getting curated content/tips from my mentor which saved me from learning things that I will probably never gonna need. 2. I got job offers even while not looking for jobs. Interesting enough, my mentor casually mentioned me within his network and those people ended up contacting me.

The best part of it is that you can get it 100% for free if you search carefully. The tech field is full of good people that are willing to give their time(usually very expensive) away to help newcomers. Specially those like me that got help from the start, paying it forward feels like a obligation.

But you might ask: “how can I connect with those experienced people?”. There are many ways to do it, but some very effective are:

- go to meetups and talk to people. Don't just sit there and watch the talks. Be part of it.

- use Twitter. You will be impressed by the amount ok knowledge that is being shared there.

- reach out To your local companies. Send them emails, knock at their doors. There is nothing cooler than seeing folks interested on your product/company.

Scala and the Play Framework became my tool belt for whatever web application I need. It has all the batteries included, it’s stable and rock-solid. It never felt so good to use a “boring” stack.

while we see some industries taking a hit during this crises, we also see many others soaring with the rise of distributed and remote work. Software products targeting this field will get even more relevant and jobs will likely flourish. That is why I believe having software/management skills are still relevant in the short/long-term.

My experience is That being part of of the local community, go to meetups, get to know people from different companies and making more friends in the field is way more important than applying for jobs. At the end of the day, a recommendation will throw you in front of the queue and sometimes you skip the interview process entirely.

Good software is written like this. Joe could not be more sharp on that. I did the exact same thing at my current company. I created a ticket system integrated in Slack where employees can quickly open a new issue and put a tag on it. A ticket is created in HelpScout where out IT support team follow up. Works 100% of the time and had zero downtime so far (around 2 years on production). No need for new features. It just works.