TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface...............................................................................6

Part One
LEARNING ................................................ 7

Escape Tutorial Hell .....................................................10

Always Be Learning ......................................................12
Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable ...................14
Deep Work .....................................................................18

Part Two
SKILLS ..................................................... 20

Building Your Soft Skills ..............................................21

Specializing ....................................................................24
Build Skills for the Job You Want ..............................25
Breaking Problems Down ...........................................27
Learn How to Use Your Dev Tools .........................29
Debugging .....................................................................31

Part Three
BURNOUT ............................................... 34

Don’t Learn at Home. Learn at Work .......................35

Always Take Your PTO ...............................................36
Working Effectively ......................................................38
Dealing with Imposter Syndrome ..............................42
When to Know You’re in the Wrong Environment 46

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 When You Make a Mistake at Work ..........................50
Promise What You Can Deliver .................................53

Part Four
CAREER ................................................... 55

Creating a Daily Schedule ............................................56

Provide Value ................................................................58
Zero to Onboarded ......................................................61
Managing Your Manager .............................................64
Find a Mentor ................................................................68
Act as if You Already Have the Title ........................69
Effective Pairing ............................................................72
The Twenty Minute Rule .............................................75
Final Notes ....................................................................77
Resources .......................................................................78

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 Preface
I wanted to write the book that I wish I could have read when

were outdated and I felt the advice didn’t apply to me. But I
wanted to read everything I could about coding and growing
my career, so I continued reading them. These books would
tell me to keep my head down and work at growing engineer-
ing skills or to become the mythical 10x engineer.

I immediately knew that skills alone wouldn’t be enough to

have a successful career as a developer.

While you do need to be a competent engineer, the industry

has changed. More companies are going remote than ever

that are available online and free, anyone can teach them-
selves how to code.

make yourself invaluable to any company. It’s not enough

to just be good at coding anymore. The “10x engineer” is a
term to describe an engineer who is 10 times as talented and
productive as other engineers, but in actuality is more of an
antisocial coder who codes all day and all night. They keep to

Time and time again at work, I saw the people that could
advocate for themselves and had great soft skills chosen for
promotions and raises while the “10x engineers” remained
stagnant in their careers for years.

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Advancing in your career means advocating for yourself, add-
ing value, mentoring others, excellent soft skills and so much
more.

Being the mythical 10x engineer isn’t the end all be all for a
great career. Companies want the 10X engineer where you
are adding exponential value; value to other people’s work,
instead of coding by yourself all day.

After all, what’s better? 10? Or 1010?

A Standout Developer is the exponentially valuable engineer.

contribute so much to the team that they feel completely

Engineering skills are still essential to your career success. I’ll

never say they aren’t. But that’s not the only thing you can
rely on to have a successful career in engineering.

This book will teach you all you need to know about surviving

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 PART ONE

LEARNING
T here is an endless stream of new challenges to tackle in
technology. The frameworks you know will change. The
tools you feel so comfortable using will evolve. Technologies
will go in and out of style. You may want to switch to a new
language or framework when your interest wanes in another.

Working in engineering means you’re always learning some-

-

skills, now the market has changed. React has overtaken all
other frontend frameworks as the hot new technology. While

Keeping your skills fresh is one of the key parts to being a

Standout Developer and building a lasting career. This might
seem challenging when you start out. I remember looking at
everything I had to learn and feeling so frustrated when peo-
ple would discuss some new technology that I didn’t know.
And as soon as I felt competent in one framework, another
one would become popular. I felt I would never catch up.

However, I came to learn that continuous learning is one of

the best parts of being an engineer because you will never
be bored. And this is a tool you can use to set yourself apart
from the competition.

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 Learning
9

Learning how to learn like a developer is nothing like how

you’ve learned in school. There will be some reading, and

When you were a child, you learned by doing.

You started speaking even if it wasn’t in full sentences. You

started drawing by doing. You didn’t read about it as an in-
fant. You weren’t reading the “Baby’s Guide to Fingerpainting
101.”

You started walking by practicing. And this helped you to

grasp new concepts quickly. You were always doing.

Traditional schools miss the point here because we are taught

to passively learn. We’re taught to be quiet and soak in knowl-
edge from experts.

Not to knock schools or courses or tutorials. These are all

essential to your growth. But you need to use those tools to
build rather than passively learn about them.

Generally in engineering, concepts will start to stick if you

focus on building rather than memorization. When I started
out as an engineer, I would read books constantly and make

would teach me how to code and make me a superstar engi-

neer. But that never happened.

-
cards would do.

was right back where I had started. It wasn’t until I started

building that my skills accelerated. While I loved reading en-

spent skimming the book and then trying out a new concept
right away.

This is a more painful way to learn. I won’t lie to you - it’s

scary. But nothing helps build new programming skills quite
like building something out yourself. The fastest way to learn
to code will be by building.

But how can you do this?

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 The Standout Career
10

Escape
Tutorial Hell
W hen I was learning how to code, I spent months fol-
lowing tutorials. I would watch the tutorial and follow
along step by step. Never attempting to do anything on my

one. I would spend hours every day watching tutorials.

I would spend all my time studying tutorials and didn’t build

anything more complex than a freeCodeCamp exercise for
months.

I tried to use the skills about learning I had from college

-
cards. And it didn’t work. Learning how to code is about ac-
tive learning. Not passive.

But it was so easy following tutorials. I never felt stupid or

felt any imposter syndrome. I would feel like I had accom-
plished something at the end of the day. Meanwhile, I was
absentmindedly following along with the video and not learn-
ing a single thing. I wasn’t pushing myself. If you want to
learn new skills fast, you have to push yourself.

-
ing the warm weather, I realized I had learned next to noth-

watching tutorials over actually building anything. Meanwhile,

whizzing right by me at a pace I thought was incredible.

I felt so frustrated. I couldn’t even create a basic application.

If it wasn’t in a tutorial with step by step guides, I couldn’t

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 Learning
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do it. It wasn’t until I started focusing on building something

clicked for me.

Step away from the tutorials as soon as you can. This is likely
before you feel comfortable. Tutorials are great when you’re
starting out, but at a certain point, they only slow down your
learning as you learn to rely on them.

can do now. Don’t use a tutorial. Figure out how to build it on

your own. Don’t feel bad if you can’t build an entire applica-

Let’s say you want to switch to machine learning from a role

start coding. Later on we’ll discuss how you can break down
problems into achievable steps.

A Standout Developer is always an endless learner.

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 The Standout Career
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Always Be
Learning
W of material you learn every day seems astronomi-
cal. You’re picking up new concepts constantly. It seems like
there’s an endless stream of information to learn.

Ideally, you’ll always be learning something new, no matter

how long you’ve been an engineer. But this isn’t what always
happens. You begin to feel comfortable. And after all that
hustle to get up to speed, it can feel like you deserve a break.
Maybe the feeling of boredom feels like a luxury. Then it’s
commonplace. And the nagging feeling that your skills have
started to stagnate sets in.

A developer that is always learning is a developer that is al-

ways employed.

Keeping your skills sharp will keep your employment status

stable even in tough economic times.

Here are a few ways you can always be learning.

Write code. A lot of it.

Find developers that are better than you and work with
them.

-
nated.

Attend meetups and conferences.

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 Learning
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Subscribe to newsletters.

Start connecting with developers on Twitter.

Read constantly.

Take online courses.

Read blog posts.

Find a mentor.

Share your knowledge.

Write blog posts.

Some of these things you can’t do in your spare time. And

you can be learning during your work hours like switching

Being a Standout Developer doesn’t mean you need to spend

When you’re working on a new skill, step away from the tu-
torial. Try to pick up tasks at work that use the new skills you
want to acquire. This will enable you to build skills quickly

While learning new skills, you also need to push yourself. You
need to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

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Get Comfortable
Being
Uncomfortable
B efore I became an engineer, taking tutorials felt easy
and welcoming. I rarely felt overwhelmed. I would use
Codecademy and other similar platforms and think I was
making progress. But I wasn’t.

After over 6 months of tutorials, I wasn’t much further along

beginner.

in a constant state of fear. I felt like I could never get enough

work done. It was a terrifying feeling. Yet I suddenly learned
faster than I ever had in my life. My brain felt like a sponge.

Find opportunities for growth. If you continue to do the same

-
ties for growth. If you take on the same tasks at work and
continuously work on the same things, you won’t be pushing
yourself and growing.

Always be biting more than you can chew. If you spend all
your time taking tutorials, it will begin to feel routine and it
won’t be a challenge anymore. You won’t be learning.

However if you choose to push yourself, you’ll learn faster.

You’ll be uncomfortable which means you’re growing. Much
as if you were learning to play piano. If you kept practicing

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15

-
dent with it, you wouldn’t be improving your skills by learning
more challenging pieces.

The same principle applies to most things in life.

-
cide between a position at Apple and an apprenticeship at a
small start-up. The role at Apple paid more and I knew peo-
ple who worked there so I would have built-in friends and a
support system. However, the role was half-QA and half-engi-
neering with an opportunity to move to full-time engineering
if things went well.

entire engineering organization.

Not to mention -- this wasn’t

a three-month apprenticeship with no assurance that I would

failed the apprenticeship.

This was back when coding bootcamps were at the apex of

the bubble. Hundreds of coding students were graduating

ever before. Job postings frequently included, “No bootcamp

grads” which was highly discouraging.

I knew if I started at Apple, it would be good for my resume

and my bank account. But I couldn’t stop thinking about
growth and mentorship opportunities that the start-up of-
fered me. If I had this book when I was contemplating the
start-up position, I would have accepted the apprenticeship
immediately.

Sadly, I had no idea what to do. I had been sold the idea of

I ended up accepting the three-month apprenticeship. Most

of my friends thought I was crazy. My own family thought I
had lost it.

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 The Standout Career
16

I suddenly had three months to prove myself at the appren-

ticeship. I quickly lost count of how many weekends and late
nights I worked. I was .

The pace was fast and I was blown away by how little I knew.
I felt so nervous some days that I wanted to call in sick. I
would fantasize about my train getting delayed underground
so I would be forced to miss work. Every stand-up felt like
torture because I felt I wasn’t doing enough.

Meanwhile, friends from bootcamp were discussing their

a reasonable hour every day. Not to mention, they were paid

meeting about the apprenticeship. I was convinced they were

-
ing the apprenticeship program a month early and they were

the company. I can’t describe how happy I was that day.

I continued throwing myself into my work. I would volunteer

for tasks that I didn’t feel ready to complete. If I didn’t know
how to do something, I would say I could do it anyway. A year
and a half after that, I was a senior software engineer at the
same start-up. Becoming a senior engineer gave me credibil-

Would it have been easier if I accepted the position at Apple?

Absolutely. But the engineers I knew that had accepted the
Apple position never had a company like I did to push them
and challenge them to improve their skills.

In the long term, my friends at Apple had to spend time re-

covering from missed learning opportunities and their career
tracks slowed. Some have the same entry-level title years
later.

Depending on your goals, a stable career at a good compa-

ny might be enough for you. And that’s okay. But I wanted
to become a Standout Developer with an exceptional career.
And I’m guessing if you’re reading this, so do you.

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 Learning
17

-
ple thought it wasn’t a good move. But I chose to be uncom-

Choose discomfort. The biggest most rewarding success in

up a task you don’t know how to solve.

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 The Standout Career
18

Deep Work
C ing context to check your phone or social media plat-
-

forms will be detrimental to the amount of work you can get

done in a given day.

Most people will work for a few minutes and then check their
phone. If the average employee spends two hours or more
being unproductive each day, you can quickly become known
as an engineer who gets things done by simply spending your
work hours actually working.

The average employee works 8.8 hours per day. But only 3 of
the hours are spent productively.

By building a habit of focus and deep work, you’ll become an

engineer that stands out from the crowd. Creating this habit
will also show that you have an indestructible work ethic.

How long can you go without checking your phone or Face-

book or Twitter? How many times have you checked it since
you’ve been reading this book?

If you can go a few hours without looking at your phone, feel

free to skip this section. If you’ve checked your phone several
times in the last half hour, read on.

How can you build up your focus?

If you haven’t read it, pick up a copy of Deep Work by Cal

-
modoro Technique is a time management technique that in-
volves using a timer to work in intervals on one task for a
length of time.

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 Learning
19

Try to focus on one task for 20-25 minutes without interrup-

-
sary tabs and put a big sign on your door that says ‘DO NOT
DISTURB.’

Start building this time up. Try to work up to a 45 minute

uninterrupted session. In such a distracted world, the ability

suddenly get done in a short time will be shocking.

can help you stay focused. Try to experiment with a few and
see what works for you.

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 PART TWO

SKILLS
T he Standout Developer has many tools in their tool-
box. But some of the most impactful tools are ones you
wouldn’t expect. Soft skills and advocating for yourself can
mean a promotion over an engineer with more technical skills.
Knowing how to debug quickly and breaking down problems

or leaving work early.

In this chapter, we’re going to discuss soft skills, debugging,

specializing, breaking down problems and more.

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Building Your
Soft Skills
T he right soft skills will make you a Standout Developer.
Many people can learn to code, but not many developers
approach coding with the right soft skills. The developers that
focus on growing in avenues outside of coding are the ones
that will get the promotions, raises, and greater opportunities
over the course of their career.

I’ve worked with some incredibly talented 10x engineers. Yet

time and time again, I’ve seen the engineers who could ad-
vocate for themselves and help others chosen for the big
promotions.

Active Listening
Early in my career, I was a passive listener. That was what
I had been taught to do in college. But staying quiet and
soaking in knowledge won’t help you grow your engineering
career.

I would sit in meetings and think about the weekend. I would

be in an All Hands meeting thinking about the work I needed
to get done. I could be listening to a team lead detail some
work we needed to get done and be thinking about what I

Everything changed when I started becoming an active lis-

the tech lead. I was present in meetings and able to add bet-

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22

ter input and speak up, which meant deeper understanding

and happier teammates and managers.

Active listening means deep focus on what the other person is

saying, processing, understanding, and responding thought-
fully. This can only be achieved when you are present and “in
the moment.” Most people are able to actively listen to their
friends and family where they feel engaged, but unable to do
so at work or in a meeting.

You need to become an active listener if you want to build a

Standout Career. Learning this crucial skill will help you in-
crease your value as an employee.

You need to regularly work on building your active listening

skills. Here are a few strategies to help you be an active lis-
tener at work:

Commit to being here, now. Take a moment to acknowl-

edge that while you may have many other things on
your mind, you will have to think and worry about them
later.

After an engineer explains something to you, repeat

what they have said in your own words. Create a sum-
mary of the instructions or knowledge and ask them
if your summary is correct. This will ensure that you
understand the instructions you’ve been given and also
show them that you value their knowledge-sharing. If
you are in a larger room where this would not be possi-
ble, take notes and send them to the engineer to con-

forces you to be present and pay attention.

need to take and determine quickly what is still fuzzy

the spots that would have blocked you early on, before
it becomes an issue.

Regularly stop and take notes when someone is pairing

with you or walking you through some unfamiliar code.

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 Skills
23

This will help you not only in your career but all aspects in
your life.

Taking Responsibility
Don’t make excuses. If you make a mistake at work or if
something was your fault, own it. Be forthcoming, and ex-
plain how you won’t make the same mistake again and what
you’ve learned. You can preemptively take responsibility for
a mistake and prevent your manager from needing to bring
it up.

If you made the mistake because you didn’t have enough

resources or mentorship, ask to do a retrospective with your
manager on the issue and work on ways that the company
can better support you in the future. A retrospective is a
meeting used in agile development where you take time to

This has saved me a lot of anxiety and stress throughout my

career. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve brought up to
my manager how I made a mistake and what I’m going to do

discuss that as well. By owning the mistake, you can avoid

stress for both parties. Managers will appreciate you taking
issues seriously and autonomously planning to course correct
for the future.

We’ll discuss this more in the When You Make a Mistake sec-
tion later in the book.

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 The Standout Career
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Specializing
A senior software engineer needs to be well-rounded. But

and excel at it.

Early in my career, I didn’t specialize. I tried to go straight

into doing it all. I started out as a frontend engineer but
quickly decided I wanted to do more backend tasks. Not long
after that, I wanted to learn mobile frameworks so I taught
myself iOS and even moved to the iOS team. Then back to

After all of this, I discovered that I should have focused on

you excel in one specialty yet, pick the one that interests you
the most and commit (at least for now).

far more powerful than trying to learn everything at the same

time. As you advance in your career, it’s likely you’ll start to
pick up new programming languages. But now is not the time
to try to do it all.

Be wary of how enticing learning something new can be. It’s

easy to be seduced by a new hot framework, tool, or library.

small percent of time each week to explore your other inter-

ests.

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25

Build Skills for

the Job You
Want
T no one will be delivering these gifts to you. You need to
build the skills and get there yourself. Think about companies

Identify patterns and recurring details.

Start building skills in those areas. But rather than looking

at a long laundry list of skills you need to have and feeling
unmotivated, pick one skill to start.

Hone in on that skill. Spend a few months developing that

-
tending meetups and networking with people who are ex-
perts in that skill. Take free online courses.

Most importantly, focus on building with that skill. Try to work

-
teer to take on tasks at work that will get you experience in
the new skill you want. You don’t need to spend all your free
time focused on coding. Try negotiating with your manager
for an allotment of time to spend on learning by focusing on
-

and work for them.

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26

After you’ve built a few things with that skill and feel con-

overwhelmed by how many skills you need to learn.

Focus on one skill at a time.

Similarly, learn to break your problems down. Looking at a

large task can feel extremely daunting. But if you learn how
to break problems down into smaller pieces, you’ll be able to
tackle complex problems without fear and this will help you
throughout your career.

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 Skills
27

Breaking
Problems Down
I mposter syndrome left me feeling immobilized for years.
I didn’t think I could get my work done in a given day.
I sometimes would spend half the day panicking about my
work and end up working at night and on weekends to make
up for the work I missed because of my anxiety. I would
dream about calling in sick to work so I could escape the
feeling of imposter syndrome and not feeling good enough.

I spent years like this. The fear of not being able to get my
work done and not being smart enough started to materialize
and become my reality. I would feel frozen on a task, not take
action and the task would suddenly look larger and larger.

It took me years to realize that if I spent less time worrying

could get my
work done. I started asking for help sooner. I started identi-
fying small tasks that I could get done within a larger ticket
that would help me make headway.

Stop worrying if you can get something done or not. The only
way to stop worrying is to take action. Break your problem
one to tack-
le.

When I’m assigned a ticket that initially feels overwhelming,

I don’t think about the problem as a whole any more. I don’t
think how much work I’m going to have to do and how scary
it is.

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 The Standout Career
28

consider what’s one small thing that I can solve in that prob-
lem? And after I’ve solved the one small thing, I select the
next thing to work on from the coding problem.

After using this strategy for years in engineering to make

The
One Thing by Gary Keller. And I realized this theory could be
applied to more things in my life as well.

Do you need to write a partial refund endpoint and create

Start with the backend. Find where the existing refund code
is. Can you borrow from that to write your new endpoint?
Start pseudo-coding what the new endpoint will look like.

Next, focus on writing the endpoint. Start with something

simple. Make sure that the endpoint is being hit when you try

of ‘Hi’ inside the endpoint. Make sure you can see this being
returned.

Your next step? Work on accepting the amount, the customer

ID and transaction ID in the endpoint. After that? Continue
breaking down the problem into the tiniest tasks you can
imagine until you have an endpoint.

-
tons needs to exist for customer support. That’s all you need

codebase. Copy and paste those. Finally, wire up your new

text input and button to your endpoint.

For any ticket you have, break them into smaller and smaller
tasks.

This will help you as you progress in your career. You’ll be

able to look at bigger and bigger problems and break them
down into smaller components and solutions. You’ll be able to

Managers will start assigning you tech lead roles because

they know you can be trusted to break things down into
smaller chunks of work and assign reasonable workload to
other people.

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 Skills
29

Learn How to
Use Your Dev
Tools
O ne of the easiest things you can do to improve your ca-
reer and skills is to learn how to use the skills you might
consider as non-critical.

Get familiar with Git and the Terminal

Many companies use Git. This will be a skill that is extremely

rest of your career.

Similarly, the Terminal will be another tool that you can learn
-
vestment throughout your career.

-
tive way to learn how to use Git and the Terminal quickly. If
you don’t have someone at work to pair with regularly, watch
tutorials. Tutorials can be helpful if you don’t have a mentor

Do not underestimate practice. Mastering a suite of com-

mands is best done through repetition.

I’ve also included a few resources at the end of the book to

help you grow your Git and Terminal skills.

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Learn how to use your IDE well

As an engineer, you might use an editor such as VSCode,
Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Xcode. Some companies have a recom-

Atom or VSCode.

Learn how to run tests in your IDE and debug if possible. And
be sure to install any linting rules the company has.

Select an IDE where you will become an expert in its use

and start learning. Consider whether it makes more sense to
become an expert in the IDE your company prefers, or the
IDE used by your dream company. Often you can learn more
about the tools used at various companies by reviewing their

personal blog posts by Engineers of that company.

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Debugging
L earning how to debug in your language of choice will sig-

neer. This will help you in almost every aspect of coding.

-

Figuring out how to debug quickly can help you to solve a

time in your day.

Here are a few things you can do to take your debugging to

the next level:

Understand the Issue

I have lost count of how many times early in my career that I

I would start digging into what I thought the issue was only

issue was something else entirely.

When you’re assigned an issue, make sure you understand it

before you start working on it. Ask clarifying questions and
verify that you’re on the same page as your product manager
or team lead.

Recreate First

it.

If you can’t recreate the bug, it’s going to be much more

the issue. If you’re unable to recreate the bug right away or

shortly after you start working, ask someone to help you to

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recreate it. If your team can’t recreate the bug, it’s possible it
may impact very few users and may need to be reprioritized.

Ask for Help

If you’re stuck on a bug, ask for help. A good rule of thumb

approach a developer with a list of things you tried so they

know you worked on your own.

own. You might learn that there’s a simpler solution that will

problem faster.

Always remember that you are paid because you deliver val-

will be. The hours you work don’t matter. Long hours that ar-
en’t spent productively won’t help you during a performance
-
pen either.

quickly as possible so you can get back to delivering value.

Rely on your team to help you get back to the task at hand.

Online courses

in. This can teach you more about solving problems quickly
than you could ever imagine.

Early in my dev career, I hated using the developer tools on

Chrome. I loved the debugger but I didn’t want to learn how
to use other tools or invest too much time into learning how
-
came my own resistance and learned how to use developer

faster.

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33

Learn By Pairing

when I watched someone else use their tools. Find ways to

watch how a senior engineer codes. Learn how they navigate
in the terminal. What shortcuts do they use? What setup do
-
cient ways they work. Take notes and ask questions. How do
they run tests and verify successful code changes?

I once paired with an incredible senior engineer on a prob-

lem. I found out halfway through the pairing session that they
didn’t know how to use the debugger in JavaScript. Access to
this tool could have sped up their productivity dramatically,

The same goes for you; you don’t know what you don’t know.

engineers and watch their process. Generally, they’ll know

own.

You can also create opportunities to learn debugging faster

at work by asking to pair on a problem that another engineer
who is assigned to the task. Ask to hear their thought process

a bug.

If you don’t have the opportunity to watch a senior engineer

work, watch online tutorials but don’t focus on the code. Fo-
cus on what tools they use. This will also help you in getting

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 PART THREE

BURNOUT
T he last time I burned out at work, I spent three months
unemployed because I could not fathom going back to

cafes. I was lucky that I had a bit of a cushion after work-

ing in San Francisco for a few years and living in some truly
shoebox-sized apartments. I did not think I could ever work
in engineering again. I was tired of feeling as if I wasn’t good
enough to be a developer and being talked down to by men
at work. More on this in the When To Know You’re In The
Wrong Environment section.

Yet at the beginning of the third month, I started to miss

again. I was lucky that I was able to take a break, restore

myself and get back into tech. Some people cannot.

Avoiding burnout as much as you can is crucial. Finding strat-

egies to cope can be your path to building a sustainable ca-
reer in tech.

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Don’t Learn at
Home. Learn at
Work
Iyour skills at

Finding opportunities to grow at work will help you to avoid

burnout. It will also help to keep you engaged and excited
which will help your employers. Generally managers do not
have to worry about a committed employee.

currently work on frontend code. Take on tickets at work that

help you to do this at work. Make your intentions known.
When your coworkers and managers know your interests,
they might think of you when an opportunity arises to work
on something that aligns with your goals. Work with your

skills, but will push you.

Want to learn a new tool that will help you improve your re-

If you don’t work at a company that facilitates learning and

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Always Take
Your PTO
F or years, I didn’t take a vacation. I didn’t travel. I didn’t
leave the country. I didn’t even leave the state.

If I took vacation time, it was a working vacation time. If I

went home for the holidays, I was taking online courses and
reading engineering books in my spare time.

Over the span of several years, the only trip I took was a
company sponsored trip to attend a popular conference with
the engineering team. I went to the Zoo for a few hours and
got right back to work after.

I was heads down, focusing on my career. My health was

poor. My eating habits were atrocious. I considered it a win
if I ate a salad along with my pizza. My friends were my co-
workers. I once even fell asleep
all the time.

Not long after that? I was burnt out. I was in misery and I was
25 years old. I ended up being unable to work for months.

There’s a trend in engineering where people feel ashamed to

management or HR what that means in practice. The best,

most productive, and happiest version of yourself is the one

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that is rested. Remind yourself that you will be more valuable

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Working
Effectively
P art of being an engineer is running into bugs and being
-
tion. However, banging your head on your desk isn’t going to

The sooner you get your work done, the sooner you can feel

Take Breaks
I have the tendency to chain myself to the desk for hours at a
time. I don’t even want to walk away from my computer until
I’ve solved a bug. I feel as if I’m physically unable to separate

Instead of spending hours stuck on a bug, ask for help. Ask

-
-
ent ways to approach your problem. Some developers even
pretend they have a ‘Rubber Duck’ on their desk and talk
through the solution with it.

hours and growing more and more frustrated only to take a

break and immediately come back to my computer able to

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While we work with computers, our brains aren’t computers.

We can’t generally force out a solution when we’re feeling
frustrated and exhausted.

Use the Pomodoro Technique

of time, working uninterrupted for that length of time, and

taking a short break. After a few “pomodoros,” you take a
longer break. For example, you might set a timer to work

After three or four sessions, you might take a twenty minute

break.

-
doro Technique. How long do you think you can go without
checking your phone? The next time you sit down and try to

phone in a half-hour period.

I found that I could complete my work faster if I didn’t check

social media, my email, or my phone. You’ll be surprised how
much more you can get done if you set a dedicated chunk of
time to work on one task without phone or Twitter breaks.

After I spent time working on growing my focus, I became

addicted to the feeling of being able to focus. I realized how
distracted and terrible I would feel when I was constantly
checking my phone. After I broke the habit of checking it con-
stantly, I didn’t want to see it at all. I started feeling better all
the time, reading more, and going outside more.

Remember to set yourself up for success during these ses-

sions. Turn your phone to do not disturb mode, and close
-
cations on my phone which was a game changer in getting
more work done each day.

either. It will mean that you can choose when you will have
distracted attention and when you want to engage on social
media or through text. You will own your own focus again
instead of your phone directing where it should be.

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You have to break the distraction cycle to build a habit of

focus.

Set a Goal

At the beginning of each day, set a goal for what you want
to get done that day. Read The One Thing by Gary Keller and

This helped inspire me to get more done at work and even

write this book.

Select a task that if you accomplished it early on in the day,

no matter what else happens, you would feel that you had a
-
tunity. Eventually, you can build this up to three tasks after

You can also try setting a dedicated calendar block for work-

breakfast, and check my email. Suddenly, it was time for

standup.

The amount of work I got done in a given day changed com-

pletely when I started forcing myself to work on the one task

thing done right away before email or chatting to coworkers

Leave a Bookmark
Something that will help you get ramped up quickly after a
long weekend is leaving yourself a little cheat card. At the

still need to complete to mark your task as done.

most important thing for the next day, but it also lets you
drop work with peace of mind until the following day.

Purchase Noise Canceling Headphones

wear my noise canceling headphones constantly even if they

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aren’t actively playing music. While the ability to work in any

situation is a superpower some people have, unfortunately I
do not possess that skill.

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Dealing with
Imposter
Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is a war. Not a battle. Some of the most
impressive people in the tech community struggle with im-
poster syndrome every day. I’ve spoken to CEOs and CTOs
with Masters in Computer Science who have built and sold
multiple companies that still deal with imposter syndrome
every day.

Here’s a little secret. If you have imposter syndrome, it means

you’re doing something right.

Real imposters aren’t worried about being an imposter. They

keep faking it and don’t care. They aren’t learning or grow-
ing. But if you’re worried about being an imposter, that means
you’re pushing yourself to do better and putting yourself in
situations that make you uncomfortable. And being uncom-
fortable when learning leads to the highest growth.

Similar to the piano example I mentioned before in the Get

Comfortable Being Uncomfortable section, if you aren’t push-
ing yourself, you aren’t learning at an accelerated pace.
You’re stagnating.

might be the right decision to focus on other areas of your

life. But if you’re at the point where you want to grow in your
career, you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

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-
drome:

Share It
Voicing your fears to your teammates can be extremely
helpful. Usually, they’re feeling the same thing or have felt
that way before. I once talked to an engineer I knew who I
thought was a genius and I told him I was really struggling
with imposter syndrome and asked if he had any tips.

He said he dealt with imposter syndrome every day. He had a

computer science degree and is a person that I consider one
of the smartest people on the planet. He was a director-lev-
el engineer who had founded and sold several companies. I
would have never guessed he had any imposter syndrome

And he said that he was dealing with imposter syndrome ev-

ery single day.

I almost fell out of my chair.

Everything changed for me in that moment. After that, I

started asking more and more people that I admired if they
had imposter syndrome. Every single person said they did.

Tech is hard. Many people struggle with imposter syndrome

and you are not alone. If someone says they don’t have im-
poster syndrome, they might have imposter syndrome so
bad that they can’t even say it out loud. Or they might be

syndrome or can’t understand it, aren’t the people you want

to work with.

Voicing your fears to your coworkers can also be a way to

share that you need help on a task. You can avoid hours
spent stuck on a task if you’re open that you need a little
help.

If you ask for help, this is not admitting weakness either.

Everyone, even the most senior engineers, ask for help. I

engineer. And this led to me feeling stuck for hours feeling

like I was never going to be a good engineer. I would take the
-

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ent solutions. I would feel more and more frustrated until I

answer. And asking didn’t kill me. Other times, the solution

own because it required domain knowledge at the company.

Asking for help earlier on will help will unblock you. You will
feel better about your work and how much you can get done
in a given day.

That’s not to say that you should always ask for help. When

it yourself. Setting a timer for yourself to make sure you are

not sinking too much time on one problem is a good practice.
When you cannot make progress, approach a colleague with
your idea for a solution and one to two things that you’ve
already tried.

Start Small

that you can work to improve. By completing one small task

you will start to feel successful. Success leads to feeling mo-
tivated, and this cycle will continue.

If you don’t know where to start on a task, reach out to a

more experienced developer on the team. Work with them to

will make you feel successful.

Motivation is a myth. I rarely feel motivated to do something

motivation doesn’t really exist. We can wait and wait for the
feeling of motivation to strike. And it rarely does.

When something spectacular has happened in my career, it

was because I forced myself to sit down and work on it every
day. This book? I’ve been writing it in a pandemic. There’s a
part of me that wants to sit and watch Law & Order every day
and eat candy. Even when I don’t feel like it, I sit down and

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Motivation comes rarely. If you wait for it to strike, you will

never reach your goals. Instead start creating systems that
will keep you accountable.

on the calendar for every day that you complete your habit.

the pressure will keep you accountable.

Another way you can start small is to create a starter habit. A

starter habit, discussed in Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, is a small
habit that forces the start of a bigger habit. For instance, if
you want to code every day, you open your editor and write
one line. If you want to write a book, you open the word doc
and write one sentence. If you want to start running, you put
on your shoes.

the book.

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When to
Know You’re
in the Wrong
Environment
W orking in tech can sometimes be toxic. I’ve worked at
some very toxic companies in my career.

It’s never easy. Bad situations don’t generally get better.

There are rare occasions where a toxic company has im-
proved but I’ve never worked at one of those companies. I’ve

the end.

stayed at a company longer than I’ve wanted. Interviewing

can be a time-consuming and demoralizing process.

Here are a few ways to tell if a company isn’t right for you
and it’s time to switch.

You Dread Going To Work

Whether it was a toxic coworker, company or situation, I’ve
dreaded going to work throughout my career. Sometimes it

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But if you wake up every Monday dreading going to work, it

spare time, you aren’t a good developer.

-
cited every day to go to work. You can get your work done

your spare time.

However if you start feeling stressed about going to work and

you can’t improve the situation by switching teams or man-

You Don’t Care About The Work

Making You Feel Guilty for Taking PTO

I’ve had managers that didn’t want me to take more than a

could take a day. I had asked for a few days at least. Not only
is this potentially illegal when a start-up claims they have

If a company is pressuring you to work on weekends, nights,

companies.

You Aren’t Advancing In Your Career

Or Learning At Work

support. I’ve worked at several companies where women

weren’t getting promoted. And these were extremely smart

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It became easy to avoid promoting engineers. The culture

women.

I eventually quit. I had the title I wanted but I knew that any

worked at the company for close to a decade without a single

As an added bonus, often the biggest salary bumps in your

guarantees a bump in title and compensation.

You Don’t Feel Appreciated

The last few managers I’ve worked with told me at least once
a week that my work was valued and that I was appreciated.

If your manager or team doesn’t make you feel good to be

-
ing and feeling as if your work isn’t appreciated can lead to
burnout.

When Your Manager is Biased Against

You
There are times when your manager isn’t your ally or on your
team at work. They might have a bias that will work against
you during performance reviews. If your manager isn’t ac-
tively helping you grow your career, it might be time to switch
companies.

Generally, bad managers don’t get better quickly. A bad situ-

ation doesn’t get better overnight.

You Feel Like You Have to Act At Work

This is a tough one. If you feel as if you need to pretend at

only woman on a team or even at a company.

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Your company shouldn’t make you feel as if you need to be-

isn’t easy either, so sometimes we feel trapped in toxic situ-

ations.

environment. It might take some time and you might need to

even spend more time at an awful company while you hone

has a great and supportive team.

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When You Make

a Mistake at
Work
T here will be times where you create a bug in production.
You might take down the entire app or lose production

the temptation to displace blame or over-apologize.

Remain calm and take a deep breath. This happens to ev-

will this help your career, but this will help you stay safe from
burnout. You need to maintain a calm mindset.

And this isn’t easy. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t
react well when you make a mistake. It’s an evolving process.

Here’s what you need to do when you make a mistake:

Accept Responsibility
The most graceful thing you can do after making a mistake is
to accept responsibility.

In engineering, sometimes there is a tendency to want to

that you slow how fast you learn. By bringing what you don’t
know into the open, you accelerate your knowledge.

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The best thing you can do for your career when you make a
mistake is be upfront with your manager and ask for advice
on how you could do better in the future.

If your manager sees you take responsibility and work to

make things better, you’ll be in a much better place than if
you tried to absolve yourself from any ownership. Engineers

not only alienate themselves and lose trust, but they tend to

Keep your Ego Small

In engineering, egos can be large. Your goal is to keep your
ego small. Be open to feedback. Welcome advice when
someone tells you how to do better. This does not mean you
shouldn’t celebrate your accomplishments. Simply that you
should maintain the mindset that you will always be learning.

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. If someone’s

feedback or advice is actually harassment, immediately re-
port them to HR if you feel safe doing so. Or speak to your
manager or a trusted friend.

When you’re not sure about something, ask a trusted co-

and someone is pushing on a topic in a meeting, take a deep

breath before you get upset and try to see their point of view.

Maintain a Calm Mindset

Do not get anxious or panicked. Everyone makes mistakes.
As your career progresses, you will start to learn this and
accept mistakes you might make. But in the beginning, it’s

choice. You can beat yourself up over every mistake, or be

kind to yourself and accept that you are still learning.

Strategies for Avoiding Mistakes

When you’re deploying or making a change to a data-
base and you start to feel anxious, take a deep breath
and write down all the steps of what you intend to do.
Send this to a more experienced developer on the team

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and ask for their feedback. Doing this will make you feel

about something, ask a question.

Take extensive notes. Making mistakes is unavoidable.

But your goal is to not make the same mistake again.

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Promise What
You Can Deliver
Y our goal is to be known as a dependable coworker. The
engineers that receive promotions and raises at work are
the ones that are dependable and do great things.

Don’t commit to what you can’t deliver.

If you’re constantly committing to too much work and missing

deadlines, this will hurt your reputation at work. You’ll become
known as someone who can’t manage their time, or worse,
someone who cannot be trusted.

When things are going wrong, be upfront about it as soon as

possible. By being honest and forthcoming about a deadline

to meet a deadline, or make better commitments to their direc-

tors and CTOs.

If you know you’ll have a busy week with meetings, push back
on the amount of work you take in sprint planning. Are the tick-
ets being estimated correctly? Is the team velocity accurate?
Discussing this with your manager can help the team commit
-

Maintaining reasonable commitments will help you avoid burn-

out because you won’t feel overwhelmed by perpetually trying
to get a large amount of work done. Over time, this will wear
you down.

Engineering is a marathon. Not a sprint.

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CAREER
A dvancing in software can be challenging. Titles and re-
sponsibilities vary from company to company. There will

You might have reached the title that you aspired to and need

if you’re stagnating in your career and not learning, you will

need to take action.

This section includes all the things a developer needs to know

to take their career from average to standout:

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Creating a Daily
Schedule
S I would dread them every single day. I hated having to
wait for my turn to say that I had only gotten a small feature
done that day. I would fantasize about having a doctor’s ap-
pointment or something to avoid the standup.

Now that I look back at that, I laugh. I was comparing myself

to developers with years and years of experience. Sometimes
decades. Yet I was sitting there and making myself feel terri-
ble about not doing more.

Imposter syndrome is relentless. Even if I had completed a

good chunk of work the day before, if I didn’t complete what I
felt was enough the next day, I would feel awful about myself
once more.

After I read The One Thing, I would pick one task that would
make me feel like I had made progress towards my career
goals. That one thing that I could get done that would make
me feel as if I had a productive work day.

wasn’t cut out for engineering. But after I got that one thing
done, I would feel like I was a success that day. It would lead
to more and more success because I started to feel more

Sometimes I would get to work and feel as if everything I had

most important) tasks until they felt even larger in my eyes.

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Until I started creating the bare minimum list of things I had

to accomplish that day, I felt as if every day was a struggle.
But creating the baseline list of things I had to accomplish
daily forced me to reach out for help and get past blockers
quickly.

must achieve those tasks. And that will lead to a feeling of

pressure which will create growth.

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Provide Value
S omething clicked for me a few years into my engineer-
ing career. And it’s something that people don’t share
enough in tech.

Job security means providing as much value as you can.

being an engineer meant banging your head on a problem

took some time to realize that if I provided value sooner, I

Here are a few things I did to show I added value to the team.

Take Ownership
Becoming a valued developer on your team means taking

my dev career, I believed that this was years away for me. I
didn’t even try. I was happy to think that career progression
meant putting in the work over the years.

Engineering doesn’t work that way.

to your employers. For instance, if you know enough about

the user experience, and you see that the company wants
to work on a ticket that will take a lot of time without a big
return, push back. You’ll save the company time and money.

When I started out in my career, I couldn’t ship new features

as fast as the senior developers. I wasn’t as good at code
reviews or onboarding new people to the codebase.

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But there were other ways that I could still help the compa-
ny while I grew my coding skills gradually. I started writing
documentation and leading guilds, which are a small group
of engineers focused on one technology. I attended meetups
and spoke about the company at events and on panels.

Understand how the product at your company works. You

should know how the product works and what the user ex-
perience is. If you don’t know the architecture of the system
you work on, and it’s not well documented, ask a senior engi-
neer on your team to walk you through it and take extensive
notes.

Regularly review the product roadmap for opportunities to

If your company is public, read quarterly and annual share-

holder reports to understand what the company cares about

can about their strategy, competition, and market position.

Understanding the business at a high level will help you, as
an owner, to make decisions that align with the company.

Speak up in meetings. Your opinion is valuable. I thought my

opinion wasn’t valuable when I started my career. I wanted
to stay silent in meetings. By staying silent, I made myself
less valuable to the company. And I slowed my own learning
as well.

massive missteps in the past by not considering diversity.

Teach Others

your career.

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much to my team. I struggled with basic tasks and every-

thing took me so much longer to do compared to the other
developers. Every single day felt like a struggle.

continued like this for a while until the day I started teaching
others.

to help mentor me. But instead of him mentoring me, I on-

boarded him onto the app and started mentoring him. By

than I thought previously.

increase my value in the eyes of the company.

Even if you are like I was and think you can’t provide value
by teaching others, you can. And once you teach someone

Teaching others can also help you learn faster. When you
learn a new concept, pretend like you’re teaching it to some-

didn’t know were there.

Find Tasks That Help the Team (Even if

You Don’t Love the Task!)
Taking on tasks that the rest of the team doesn’t like can help
build relationships within your team. If you take on unpleas-

feel more successful at work and your team will be thrilled

as well.

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Zero to
Onboarded
O nboarding to a company is a skill you’ll improve on

you improve, you’ll onboard faster each time.

better than others.

But there are a few things you can do right away to quickly

don’t have years of experience.

Learn the Process

Watch how the team works together. Learn the tools whether
it’s Asana or Code Climate. Watch how the meetings are run
and start contributing.

Actively listen and clarify on requirements and information

envision the steps you’ll take and try to see if you don’t know
how to do something so you can ask questions before you
become blocked.

Take Extensive Notes

During your onboarding, take notes in great detail. This will
ensure that you never need the same thing repeated to you
twice. If you extensively document how to deploy the appli-

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cation or make a database change, you’ll move quickly and

build a great reputation at work.

When someone tells you how to do something, add it to your

notes. During your onboarding meetings, take notes. When
you have a question, add it to your notes.

Take notes on everything

I keep track of everything. I copy and paste Slack messages

when someone tells me why we do deployments a certain
way. I take notes in meetings. I rewatch documentation vid-
eos and write down the commands from that.

After a year at a company, I’ll generally have 75-100 pages

become outdated but you’d be surprised at how invaluable

Keep all your notes in one document so you can search

through it easily. Don’t try to organize your notes in sepa-
rate documents. Have one massive document instead. With

need.

For instance, when someone shows me how to reset a num-

ber in a development, local, or production environment, I
have a section in my notes that says “Working locally,” and
a header that says “Remove a phone number from 2FA.” I
try to use a descriptive headline so I can search through my
notes easily later.

Later when I need to remember how to do some obscure

thing in production, I’m able to search through my notes for
keywords like “remove,” “2FA,” “phone,” or “number.” And in-
stead of asking another engineer what the command was or
how do I do that again, I can search through my own notes.

Note taking is so important, it’s worth evaluating how well

you take notes, and trying to improve. For instance, don’t
write a transcription, use shorthand. Revisit your notes at the
end of the day to make sure everything is clear for months
or years ahead when you won’t remember that day. Capture
any helpful url or resources, and who was in the room or who
you talked to.

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-
space a little and focus on more important problems.

Know Who To Ask

Know who to reach out to when you get blocked on an issue.

who works on what, you’ll know who to reach out to when

new company locate any documentation on what teams and

people own areas of each product. If this doesn’t exist, create
your own owners guide in your notes.

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Managing Your
Manager
Y our manager makes a massive impact on your career.
They have a hand in whether or not you get the promo-
tion or compensation bump you want. They are supposed to
be your advocates and allies at your company.

But this isn’t always the case. Sometimes you might need to
work on the relationship with your manager.

Dealing with a Toxic Manager

I’ve had to deal with some pretty toxic managers throughout

Others weren’t ready for the management title and some

things like you or me. They aren’t infallible.

If you feel comfortable doing so, you might be able to give

your manager feedback and work together. As scary as this
sounds, some managers might appreciate the feedback. I
have a close friend that works as a manager and early in her
career, she had someone reporting to her give her feedback
that she wasn’t a good manager and she took the advice to
heart. She completely turned things around and is now the
most empathetic and kindest person I know.

switch teams or even companies. You deserve someone who

advocates for you and supports you in your career growth.

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Helping Them Advocate For You

Throughout the book, we’ve discussed documenting your
achievements and this is one way that they can be used to
help you and your manager.

sometimes things can slip between through the cracks. At

-
riod.

Can you imagine what my performance reviews even looked

like at that time? It was a mess. Nobody could advocate for
me to get a promotion or a raise.

And this happens all the time. I can’t tell you how many times
I’ve spoken to an engineer that dealt with continuous man-

it.

Here’s where you can step in and advocate for yourself. Doc-
ument your wins at work. Write down all your achievements
and keep a document. You can show this to your manager in
1-1 meetings when you are ready to discuss compensation
and title. And this document will be the proof that you de-
serve to get what you’ve asked for.

Without this document, you can’t back up your claims with

hard proof.

The Productive 1-1

1-1s are your time. Many engineers treat 1-1s as a place
where they receive criticism or as something that is unpleas-
ant. But this should not be the case.

A 1-1 with your manager is your time to address blockers you

might have, ask for resources and receive support. But how
can you do this?

Prepare for your 1-1s

Throughout the week, make a list of topics and keep a 1-1

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for your 1-1s shows that you’re responsible and taking your

If you walk into your 1-1 with a goal and a purpose, you’ll
be able to improve your skills as a developer and grow faster
within the company.

Here are some potential topics that you can use for a 1-1:

How is my performance?

Can I get this book/course/training material?

Can you help me resolve a frustration with the work I’m

doing?

What can I start working on for a promotion?

Do you need help with any roadblocks?

Anything that is bothering you at work.

An issue with a coworker that you need help resolving.

What are some soft skills I can improve?

What can I be doing better?

How can I do more for the company?

Ideas to improve a process or system at the company.

Find out what other employees are asking during their 1-1s
and what works for them.

Always Ask for Feedback

In 1-1s, always ask for feedback on how you can improve.
That way you’ll never be surprised in your review later. When
you always know where you stand at your company and with
your manager, you can correct an issue early on before it
becomes a real issue. Consider it a sort of career redirection.

Years ago when I started my career, I was in a 1-1 with my

manager and he mentioned that I didn’t review enough pull
requests at work.

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It wasn’t a big deal, but immediately I felt terrible. I felt like

a failure and as if I didn’t have enough skills to review my co-
worker’s pull requests. While all these feelings were swirling,

I told my manager that I had imposter syndrome when it

came to code reviews. I said that it was a huge source of anx-
iety for me to review code and comment. One of the reasons
was that some people at the company were overly critical or
would become defensive if you left a comment.

you serious?” I thought. That’s embarrassing. But we paired

on them together and I learned how I could become better
at code reviews.

He also worked some behind the scenes magic and suddenly,

the responses on pull requests were much kinder and under-
standing. Senior engineers wanted to understand why the
comments they left were making the other developers un-
comfortable.

I was blown away. And it was all because I had shared the
pain points that I had (and the luck of having a great man-
ager at the time).

Work Together
If you don’t feel you get value from your 1-1s with your man-
ager, bring that up in a non-accusatory statement. You should
be able to work together to make the 1-1 valuable to you.

You and your manager can work together and discuss what
you both want to get out of your 1-1s. Generally, if you feel

manager probably knows you feel that way and will want to
change that.

Here’s an awesome resource for improving your 1-1s.

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Find a Mentor
F inding a mentor isn’t something that happens overnight.
For one, if you’re messaging people you don’t know and
asking if they’ll mentor you, they’re unlikely to respond to
your request. They probably get this request twenty times a
day.

The best mentoring relationships develop naturally over

time. It might be someone you connected with at a meetup.
Your mentor might be a senior developer at your company.
It might even be someone you met through Twitter. The bot-

start conversations.

A mentor can help you advance your skills by pointing your

career in the right direction and helping you get past road-
blocks.

There are several types of mentorship. You might have a

mentor during your onboarding process at a company. You
might have a formal relationship where your company as-
signs someone to you. Or you might have an informal men-
torship

If you don’t have a mentorship program at work, your com-

pany can work to match you with someone through a struc-
tured website that pairs mentees and mentors or you can try
to create an informal mentorship.

Ideally this relationship happens organically. Reaching out to

someone through a cold email is rarely successful. There are
some sites that you can use to be matched with a mentor if

own.

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Act as if You
Already Have the
Title
M that I thought the only cure was becoming a senior en-
gineer. (If only someone had told me that becoming a senior

I was convinced this was how I could prove to myself that I

-

of becoming a senior developer.

the best way to prove that I was ready for the promotion. I
took on tasks that a senior developer would. In sprint plan-
ning meetings, I would volunteer for tasks even if I didn’t
know how to do them. I would do extra work every week as
well.

it at the same time for recruiters and engineers doing tech

screens.

I started speaking up in meetings when I had previously been

silent. I was in multiple guilds (iOS and Frontend) at the com-
pany and contributing to both of them on a weekly basis.

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A little over a year and a half after I had signed a full-time

-
ing while they announced that I was now a senior software
engineer.

Acting as if I had the title I so desperately coveted? It worked.

promotion. I made a lot of missteps along the way. I held

myself back. I didn’t speak up enough in meetings. I didn’t

sometimes, I worked too hard. You need not make the mis-
takes I made.

Find ways you can contribute in an impactful way at your

company. Instead of telling yourself that you don’t have the
skills to contribute as much as a senior developer or tech
lead, start watching what they do and try to recreate that
impact in your own career.

List your Achievements Daily

met in my life. Even now, their skills are unparalleled. They

I began to keep a list of things I had done right. Whenev-

er I solved a particularly challenging bug or shipped a new
feature, it went in the list. If a coworker or manager compli-
mented something I had done, it went in the list.

When imposter syndrome came knocking, I would open the

collection of achievements. I eventually outgrew the list be-

Instead of thinking negative thoughts about my engineering

skills, I would start to remind myself of positive things I had
achieved.

At the end of each day before you close your laptop for the
day, write down the tasks you worked on that day. Write
down the things you’ve learned and your accomplishments of
the day. Even if they seem small to you.

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Not only will this come in handy for your standup the next
day, but you’ll have a fantastic resource for updating your re-
sume and building a case on why you deserve a raise at your
next performance review.

Do the same thing at the end of every week and month.

Use this list as credibility to ask for a promotion or a raise.

You may think that you’ll remember when your next perfor-
mance review comes around or in your retro meeting, but
you probably will forget many accomplishments.

-
ways surprised how much I got done in the span of a few
months that I had already forgotten about.

I had achieved in the past year. I didn’t walk in with notes

prepared. I had no data on why I deserved a raise in salary.
I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t even remember what
tasks I had worked on last week - let alone the tasks from

performance review went well.

Unfortunately, as I didn’t advocate for myself and the work

I was doing, I ended up missing out on over forty thousand
dollars. I was underpaid for the work I was doing for over
six months. A manager at the company unsuccessfully tried
to get me retroactive pay because he felt it was so unfair.
But I never got that bump and missed out on fair pay for six
months.

Entering a performance review without a list of your accom-

plishments at the company leaves you at a massive compet-
-
sands of dollars left on the table and a promotion.

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Effective Pairing
P airing isn’t always the answer. It doesn’t work for all
types of learners. You might learn better by knowing how
to approach the problem independently instead of pairing.
You might also not have the opportunity to pair regularly and
that’s OK.

But if pairing works for you, it can be one of the best ways

how to use dev tools easily, debugging, understanding a new

codebase quickly, and so much more.

Select the right type of pairing style for

you
-
gator. Both parties are actively engaged with the work and
while one is using the keyboard and mouse (the driver), the
other is talking through what needs to be done next (the nav-
igator). Ideally, these roles switch back and forth frequently.

write a test, and the second engineer will make it pass. And
-
ing style because it forces both engineers to take an active
role.

Take an active role

No matter what style of pairing you and your mentor are us-
ing, you need to take an active role. It’s easy to take a pas-
sive role when pairing if the pairing style isn’t right for you.

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to zone out or not understand if the pairing session wasn’t

structured in an interactive way. And then the other devel-
oper would become annoyed. If you are struggling with a

to change it up.

Openly take notes

was embarrassing. Right after a pairing session, I would rush

to take notes about what I had learned and the various com-

retaining enough of the information if I waited too long.

Don’t be ashamed to take notes during the pairing session.

Copy and paste commands directly into your notes and cre-

you can refer back to notes, you won’t need to ask a senior
engineer how to do something again and again.

Plan the session

Before you start with a pairing session, plan it out. Chat with
the other engineer and discuss the following:

How long do you plan on pairing?

What breaks do you plan on taking?

How often will you switch roles?

Make sure that you and the other engineer both understand
the problem you’ll be tackling together and the goals of the

Discuss potential solutions and once you agree on one, come

up with a plan for how you’ll tackle it.

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Rotate Frequently
In order to avoid pairing burnout, switch roles during the
pairing session. If you’re driving and the other engineer is
navigating, divide the pairing session in half and each of you
should spend half the time in the other role. When you take
a break, switch the roles again. A productive pairing session
won’t be with one person in the driving or navigating seat the
entire time. Switching back and forth is crucial.

Ask Questions

enough questions and this hurts them in the long run.

Don’t be scared to admit you don’t know something. There

are no dumb questions. By exposing what you don’t know,
you’ll learn faster and become a better engineer.

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The Twenty
Minute Rule
I was ashamed to ask engineering questions for years. I
would spend ages stuck on a problem trying every solution
I could think up before I would admit that I needed help.

Only after I had exhausted all options would I approach

someone at the company to ask a question. And I hated do-
ing that.

It wasn’t until a few years into my career that I started feeling

policy where you couldn’t spend more than twenty minutes

blocked on a problem. That meant that if you had environ-
mental issues, or you weren’t sure to look next for a bug and
twenty minutes had elapsed, you had to post the problem on
the company Slack channel.

Sometimes the other developers wouldn’t know the answer,

but usually, someone would have run into the same issue
before and voila - my issue would be solved. And I’d move
onto other work.

feel ashamed about asking questions because everyone else

was doing the same thing.

Shawn Wang, author of the Coding Career Handbook, dis-

cusses how you should always learn in public. Learning in
public helps expose the gaps in your knowledge so you can
learn faster.

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But so many companies have a culture of shame around ask-

ing questions. For years, I tried to “learn while hiding.”

But hiding your learning slows progress. It doesn’t expose

what is easier? Asking a lot of questions when you are new to

the role? Or later on when you are frustrated, going it alone,
and your colleagues are surprised by rudimentary questions
from someone who has been around a while.

team member after I’ve been blocked on something for too

long. I choose to stop wasting time being stuck and banging
my head against the wall on problems - I reach out for help
instead.

Change your mindset around asking questions.

Tip
save time and face. You won’t have to spend a few hours
working on a task only to realize you still don’t get it, and
have to go back and ask for help again. When someone tells
you how to solve a problem, stop (and take notes if you can)
and check if you really understand the information given to
you. If you don’t, ask a follow up question.

Talk to your manager and discuss the twenty minute rule.

would bring to the company. Not only to their culture, but to

the company’s bottom line as well.

If you calculate how much time engineers spend blocked on

small issues throughout the day and multiply that by their
hourly salary, the company is losing a tremendous amount
of money.

Not to mention, if you’re sharing information in public Slack

-
vironment issues, you are surfacing general knowledge that
can be captured for the future.

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Final Notes
T More companies are going remote than ever before. You

Becoming a highly skilled engineer with exceptional soft skills

will make you a valued employee that your company will
want to keep
because you will always have a stellar recommendation from
past employers.

I hope this book has helped you on your way to becoming an

exponentially valuable engineer with a Standout Career.

I’d love to stay in touch. Follow me on Twitter at

@RandallKanna.

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resources
Here are a few of my favorite resources to help you grow your
career.

Books
Career Focused Dev Books

The Coding Career Handbook

Improving Your Coding Skills

Code Complete Two

Introduction to Algorithms

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

-
ware

Git Courses

Learn Git by Codecademy

Learn Git with BitBucket

Learn Git Branching

Git - The Simple Guide

Git Immersion

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Command Line Resources

Learn Enough Command Line to Be Dangerous

Learn the Command Line By Codecademy

Self Improvement

Deep Work

The One Thing

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

No Hard Feelings
Tiny Habits
Websites
Any course by Stephen Grider. I cannot say this enough. You

and Node courses.

Educative

Egghead.io

Frontend Masters

Scotch.io

edX

Coursera

Codementor.io

Developers

Shawn Wang

Madison Kanna

Kyle Shevlin

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Saron Yitbarek

Angie Jones

Kent C. Dodds

Ken Dodds

Quincy Larson

Will Johnson

Gergely Orosz

The Coding Career Handbook

Ania Kubów

Ben IIegbodu

Molly Struve

Chris on Code

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