Develpreneur: Become a Better Developer and Entrepreneur

Slow and steady wins the race.  This is a fact of life we are taught in grade school.  Unfortunately, it is one that is easy to forget.  Some goals and objectives seem too big for us to achieve them.  However, we can use the approach of steady improvement to reach heights that seem unobtainable. Steady Improvement and Momentum The concept of momentum is one of the most important ones that come from steady improvement.  Once we start to do even a little work on a task each week or day, it becomes easier to continue on that course.  We are more likely to stay current on our progress mentally (as opposed to forgetting our place) and our time to get started back on the task will be shorter.  Those regular mental switches to thinking about a new task become more natural and even familiar. Habit Forming Much like momentum, steady progress also helps build habits.  We may not think of "work" on a task as a habit, but it is.  Physical exercise is a well-known example of this.  People that exercise every day or every other day turn that into a pattern.  Their life and mental focus solidify around that schedule, and there are fewer obstacles to continue that path. This concept is more applicable to business and technical tasks than I initially thought.  I wonder if this is not one of the best ways to be productive overall.  Putting in a little time towards a goal every day allows for plenty of time to mull over your approach in the back of your mind.  It is almost a forced way to step away from problems on a regular basis to solve them.  I also find that writer's block situations are less likely to occur.  Writing is a blatant example of this.  I can consider what I want to write during the day and then I am ready to dive in for my short time on that task when I get to it. In fact, some tasks become a form of reward by the time I get to them.  I will have thoughts about the task that I want to apply so performing the task becomes cathartic.  The steady improvement you choose can be in as little as minutes a day.  Why not start this week and see how it works for you.

This episode is the second in a two-part interview with Connor Gillivan of Freeeup.com (Part One is here).  This time we look at his company and how they might be an excellent resource for you.  That holds whether you are a provider or if you are looking for help. A Curated Model Conner describes their model and approaches far better than I.  However, I will say that they have a different process for connecting workers and customers than many of the other sites.  They vet their resources and use that knowledge to match the best worker for a given project.  This method takes a lot of the guesswork out of finding a good customer or a good freelancer.  Truly a win-win approach to the outsourcing model. Connor Gillivan He is a 27-year-old serial entrepreneur that started out of his college dorm room.  He has sold over $25 million on Amazon and has grown FreeeUp.com over 500% in the past year.  Connor is a published author and runs his own blog (ConnorGillivan.com).  He lived and worked 2 summers in South Africa building social businesses in extremely impoverished communities before starting my first business.  If that is not enough, he has also been featured on over 30 podcasts in the past year.  These include: Conscious Millionaire The Top Hack the Entrepreneur Ways to Contact Connor: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/connorgillivan/ Twitter: https://www.facebook.com/connorgillivan/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorgillivan/ Personal blog: http://connorgillivan.com/ FreeeUp: https://freeeup.com/ Calendar: calendly.com/connor-gillivan Email: connor@freeeup.com

As we continue our overview of IT and development languages, in particular, we examine the idea of development language families.  This includes how those can impact our ability to quickly adapt to a new environment. Modern Development Language Families The good news about this concept is that the most popular modern languages fall into only a few categories of families.  Thus, once you have even one or two under your belt, it can be a short trip to ramp up to a new language or environment.  The programming language concepts you see in any given language will tend to be consistent.  Better yet, even the syntax will start to become familiar. Improve Your Career in Small Steps The key to using these traits to become a better developer (and further your career) is to understand the development language families that exist.  These families provide a path of complementary ideas and syntax that can make your advancement through languages less work.  For example, The jump from Java to C# (in either direction) is not as substantial as one might think.  In fact, a solid developer in one of these languages can arguably start in a maintenance role on the other language with a negligible ramp-up time. This leads to more options available.  That is, once you know the languages that are a small step from those you already know.  This can lead to more job opportunities with your current employer or others.

Your job may dictate your workspace and environment.  However, you likely have at least a little say in the way that space is configured.  Also, your side hustle workspace or home office can be configured to your personal style and situation.  Although it may seem minor, a productive workspace is important to your mental and physical health. A Productive Workspace Is Focused When you build a home office the area you use is a critical part of whether it can be productive or not.  Distractions exist in every environment.  However, the more you can reduce the impact of these, the better it will be for your focus.  This includes the ability to shut a door, when needed, and put away devices and items that can break your focus. This challenge may include things like a clock, television, or even a window.  I prefer to have a window in my workspace so I can get some exposure to natural light.  Unfortunately, that can sometimes be distracting if you are facing a location where people, cars, or animals regularly are regularly seen. Office Supplies And a Rant One of my challenges with a home office is the accessibility of office supplies.  I must confess, I do go on a sort of mini rant in this episode as I list some common supplies we can easily forget.  The time lost trying to find a working pen or a strip of tape can quickly add up.  The obvious things like a desk, chair, or monitor are easy to remember.  The lesser used items like post-it notes, writing implements, and paper clips can be easy to forget.  Even worse, those easy to forget items can add up to a lot of lost time.

One of the benefits of the popularity of social networks is that we can build a personal brand and reach a broad audience.  We can open our target market up to the world and are not limited to our city, state, or country.  It is tempting (and common) to have a presence on several platforms rather than restrict our reach.  Yes, there is overlap, but why not reach as far as possible when these sites are free to use. A Consistent Voice The challenge with all of these social networking sites is that we need to have the same message and presentation of our brand on all of them.  This hurdle is only made more difficult but us adding a site here and a profile there.  If we sat done and created all of our profiles in one sitting, whether a few hours or a few days, then it would be routine to make them all very similar.  This approach is not likely when we add a profile now, then one in a few months, a couple more next year, and so on. That being said, we can build a list of our profiles.  Then we can do a review of them all in one sitting or short period.  In fact, this profile review and update should be performed on a regular basis.  I recommend at least once or twice a year. Start With a Strong Message Whether starting out or doing a review, your first step is to define and refine your message, image, and thus, your brand.  The voice, attitude, images, style, and flow should all speak to your brand.  If you struggle with this, then check out a book or post on how to define a brand.  People far more talented than me have provided a lot of content on that. Once you have that core message and look-and-feel defined, then you can proceed to adjust every profile to match that brand.  Be aware that some tweaks may be required depending on the platform.  There are general platforms like a Twitter or Facebook.  However, the niche community sites are far more prevalent.  This includes platforms like LinkedIn and many corporate community sites.  You should also be clear on acceptable use both stated and implied.  When you join a website and start posting, your goal is to be true to your brand.  However, do not do so in a way that may offend the community.  A mistake like that can cost you more than your audience on that site.

Just like software, your professional development will go better with a solid plan.  In this episode, we look at how to create a career roadmap and advance along the path.  Every individual has their likes, desires, and needs for their professional development.  We start with general technologies and platforms then proceed to look at some specifics and keeping your roadmap in mind. Creating the Career Roadmap The key to a good career roadmap is to cover areas of development in both general and specific ways.  You need to have precise enough goals to plan and measure our progress.  On the other hand, we need to be able to adjust our plan as technology advances.  We might even have to add new areas as we move through our career.  For example, mobile development did not exist when I started my career.  It is now a common area of expertise that is in demand. Recalculating A successful developer will find ways to assess and adjust throughout their career.  There will be new "hot" technologies that may require a detour from the roadmap.  Likewise, some technologies will suggest a whole new approach to your plan.  Similar and derivative topics can be used to speed your journey.  However, as things change and evolve you may find better paths to your goals. Just a GPS occasionally has to recalculate your directions to a destination; things will happen that may require a career recalculation.  The good news is that a flexible plan will also allow for changes in likes and frustrations.  You may start your path thinking that a specific area of focus will be enjoyable and then find out later it is not.  This is a great time to review and alter your career roadmap.  There is no sense in working hard to reach goals that are not enjoyable. The Details The specific technologies and buckets of skills to pursue wraps up the episode.  Suggestions are provided for how to fill your "buckets" of goals.  However, it is more focused on how to make real progress on your career roadmap and become a better developer year over year.

Life is busy and hectic.  Our modern lives include not only a potentially overwhelming amount of responsibilities but copious amounts of "stuff."  Thus, sometimes the burden of daily life causes stress and extra work.  An excellent answer to this struggle is to simplify things wherever possible.  When you have less to worry about there will be more free time and focus becomes almost automatic. Digital Simplification The flurry of apps, devices, and content subscriptions available to us make it easy to suffer from an overwhelming amount of little bills to manage.  These tend to go hand-in-hand with landing us on mailing lists for electronic and snail mail.  It is also easy to have overlapping subscriptions.  These things may only take a few minutes a week to maintain.  However, those minutes and related worry do add up.  Yes, the options are often challenging to differentiate.  Nevertheless, you will find choosing a single solution rather than multiples is worth the reduced stress. For example, Goole, Apple, and Amazon offer a lot of similar services may entice you to utilize all three.  Keep it simple.  Bet on one platform and go with it.  The time saved in finding which platform you used for which service can quickly add up to hours a week. The Physical World Any items we own that exist in the real world are almost always going to suffer from age and decay.  They also take up space.  This situation can become a never-ending challenge.  We need ways to maintain, store, and carry our "stuff."  That means a larger living space, more items to hold items and tools to manage them.  When we nip it in the bud and keep our possessions to a minimum, it makes the rest of our lives more comfortable to live.  An excellent example of this is the idea of cost-of-living.  Our experience can be full of stuff and expensive or minimalist and cheap.  Think about it.  Are you more likely to be happy working 80 hours a week to support a life of things or 40 hours a week with fewer possessions?

The interview process is a part of every facet of a business.  This is no less a part of IT and technology-related jobs.  In fact, the mobility of technology jobs and prevalence of short-term or part-time positions make mastering the interview critical for your career.  In this episode, we cover some great ways to approach an interview.  These will help whether you are looking for a new team member or a new position. An Interview is Selling IT workers rarely consider themselves good at sales of any type.  However, the key to a good interview on either side of the table is to properly sell your position.  As an interviewer, you are selling that the job and company are an excellent choice for the interviewee.  As an interviewee, you are trying to sell your ability to exceed expectations if you get that position.  That being said, the goal for both parties is not to only sell.  The goal is to ensure that the match is a good one.  You can go into every interview to sell yourself as the ideal candidate but what about when you are not?  The interview is a sale only if you want to complete the transaction. Bailing Out A missing piece of many interviews is the escape hatch.  Both parties should be looking for reasons to bail out on the process as much as they search for reasons to proceed.  Whether you are looking for a job or are a candidate, there should be a detailed idea in your mind of what a perfect match looks like.  This may take the form of your next step in career development or the person that can best perform the tasks your company requires to be done.  

In this episode, we continue our overview of development languages with a focus on the types that exist.  We looked at some of the core concepts in the first part of this series.  The similarities (think dialects) among languages were also highlighted.  At this point, we look at some specific ones and how there are programming language types that make some better than others for the tasks at hand. General Programming Language Types We start with the best known and most useful coding languages.  These have some strengths that may not be as strong as specialized ones.  However, they have limited weaknesses.  This combination makes these excellent choices for your first ones to master.  A general programming language not only gives you a tool for any application, but it also has a wealth of programming language concepts for you to work with and master. Specialized Programming Language Types As opposed to the general ones, specialized languages will make certain tasks easy to accomplish and maintain.  Some examples are languages that are better at building web applications, processing data, reading and writing files, presenting formatted output (reports), and the list goes on.  These tools are not going to be very helpful in the general case.  In fact, specialized languages sometimes are completely unable to solve certain problems.  They trade off having more capable strengths for reduced capability and weaker weaknesses in other areas.  Think of a drill, it is excellent for drilling (obviously), but close to useless if you want to saw through wood.

When we think of productivity tools we tend to think about our work life.  They do not tend to show up on our radar of ways to live an easier life.  Buckle up because the Internet has brought us an incredible number of tools.  These are for our day-to-day lives and not just our job. Automation and Communication The strength of the Internet and related applications is the ability to easily communicate and automate tasks.  The advances in cloud computing, mobile devices, and software as a service (SAAS) have only increased our ability to go paperless in all areas of our life.  Better yet, many of these tools are free to use for personal (non-business) tasks.  Yes, we will probably see advertisements, but that is a small price to pay for the time we get to save. Many of these tools are easy to use and have email and text messaging built-in so we can share with friends and family.  Some even provide a sort of self-service approach to organizing events, scheduling appointments, and confirming the above. Tools Mentioned in the Podcast Google Calendar Microsoft Bookings Amazon Smart Home 1-800 Dry Clean