Issue #5 - Broaden Your Skillset

You need more than just technical skills if you want to progress your career as a software developer.

Welcome to Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.

This week we have:

• Tip of the week: Level Up as a Software Developer by Broadening Your Skillset

• Book of the week: Start With Why

• Finds of the week: Get better at feedback, finding new jobs after a layoff, skills for senior engineers beyond coding.

Tip of The Week: Level Up as a Software Developer by Broadening Your Skillset

Here are four underrated ways to level up as a software developer:

1. Pair with non-developers.

2. Read a book on leadership.

3. Take a course on writing well.

4. Learn how to sell and get good at ‘sales’.

Pairing with non-developers gives you wider commercial exposure and the wider business an insight into the (often misunderstood) world of software engineering.

Learning to lead without authority will help you increase your sphere of influence increasing your impact and allowing you to use your engineering expertise to steer the team/organisation.

Writing is a superpower for software developers, it reinforces learning, enables you to share knowledge - increasing your influence within and organisation and across the industry.

And ultimately our job as software developers is writing. We write code, documentation, user stories, pull requests, tests, code review comments, design documents, ADRs and even the odd question on Stack Overflow!

Learning to sell, will help you sell yourself on your resume and in interviews.

It will help you sell others on your ideas, beliefs and vision and that will increase the impact you can have as a software developers. And if you decide to pursue a startup, you need it to sell investors and customers on your business.

Want to Level Up Your Coding Skills?

I believe the best way to do this is to build real-world applications. For that reason I write a weekly newsletter sharing Coding Challenges.

The coding challenges are all designed to walk you through the process of creating an application and to be less than 8 hours work.

Each challenge has you focus on building real-world software rather than toy applications or algorithms and data structures.

You can tackle the challenges in the programming language of your choice. You can even tackle them in several different languages if you prefer.

You can see the challenges and subscribe on the Coding Challenges SubStack.

Book of The Week: Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Sinek’s goal with this book is to show that the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way. Which it’s the opposite of what everyone else does.

He calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organisations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired.

The Golden Circle is actually made up of three concentric circles. The why is the bull’s eye in the very center, the how is wrapped around that, and the what is in the outermost circle.

The what describes the activities of the business or organisation. Usually, the what is pretty self-explanatory – it’s what you sell. The how illustrates the way the what is achieved: How do you build, sell and deliver what you sell.

The why describes the mission of a business or organisation. Why was it founded? What is its main goal?

Ultimately he argues that: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

So to build a great business, or to lead a great team you need to figure out your why and then communicate it to your customers/team members.

Share(s) of the Week:

1. To improve as an engineer, get better at requesting (and receiving) feedback

2. 6 lessons from laid-off tech workers about finding a new job

3. An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding