Coming Soon
How to Hack It as a Web Developer
As a young engineer, How to Hack It as a Web Developer teaches you how to be a professional-grade developer.
You will not learn how to code in this book. Instead, you will learn how to shape your career landscape by understanding the power of serving others.
This book teaches you how to program your professional life, not your website.
Bugs don’t just reside in lines of code. They wiggle around in our behavior, too.
Congratulations. You learned enough HTML, CSS, and javascript to land a job building websites for a living. Or perhaps you learned how to build a backend API to power the frontend. You’ve taken the first step, and now it’s time to learn a whole host of new disciplines to find success in your new field.
Have you ever presented your work to a paying client? Felt the pressure of an entire line of business bearing down on you to fix a critical site feature that is broken on production? Do you even know what production is? Staging? UAT? How should you behave when (not if) you get burned out? What about this imposter syndrome thing you keep hearing about? Should you deploy new code on a Friday if the new Project Manager says it’s approved for launch?
If you’re self-taught or fresh out of school or bootcamp, you probably haven’t spent any time working with designers or account managers or copywriters and certainly not C-level leaders. How can you be expected to know what they do for you as a developer, and in turn what you should be doing for them? Guess what, it isn’t writing code, despite that being your purported job.
With over 20 years of experience in the industry building websites for Fortune 100 level companies like Hallmark, UPS, Chase Bank, Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, and more, I have been around the block a few times and found success while laying no claim to being an elite coder. I entered the workforce not knowing any of the things you’ll learn in this book. My aim is to introduce you to the most critical aspects of the job—those that have nothing to do with the code you write and everything to do with what truly helps you flourish as a professional technologist. The little things that I wish I had known when I first started.
Spoiler: coding is only 20% of the gig.
