"Be a Software Engineer" entries
Learn a C-style language
Improve your odds with the lingua franca of computing.
You have a lot of choices when you’re picking a programming language to learn. If you look around the web development world, you’ll see a lot of JavaScript. At universities and high schools, you’ll often find Python used as a teaching language. If you go to conferences with language theorists, like Strange Loop, you’ll hear a lot about functional languages, such as Haskell, Scala, and Erlang. This level of choice is good: many languages mean that the overall state of the field is continually evolving, and coming up with new solutions. That choice also leads to a certain amount of confusion regarding what you should learn. It’s not possible to learn every language out there, even if you wanted to. Depending on the area you’re in, the choice of language may be made for you. For the overall health of your career, and to provide you the widest range of future opportunities, the single most useful language-related thing you can do is learn a C-style language.
A boring old C-style language just like millions of developers learned before you, going back to the 1980s and earlier. It’s not flashy, it’s usually not cutting edge, but it is smart. Even if you don’t stick with it, or program in it on a daily basis, having a C-style language in your repertoire is a no-brainer if you want to be taken seriously as a developer.
Read more…
What you need to consider before moving to management
Assessing the many paths to a management role.
You’ve been at your company a while, maybe as little as a couple of years, maybe substantially more, and the idea of moving into management has crossed your mind. The idea can occur for any number of reasons. Maybe you found out that there’s an opening, either internally or at a different company. Maybe someone from management has asked if you’re interested. Maybe you’ve been in your current position for a while, and it’s not as challenging as it used to be. Maybe you’ve been unimpressed with the management at your company, and you think you can do a better job. No matter what the situation, you’re suddenly faced with the idea of becoming a manager. Is jumping to management a leap you’re ready to make, and what are the alternatives if you don’t?
Read more…
Open source won, so what’s next?
What to expect at OSCON 2015.
Twenty years ago, open source was a cause. Ten years ago, it was the underdog. Today, it sits upon the Iron Throne ruling all it surveys. Software engineers now use open source frameworks, languages, and tools in almost all projects.
When I was putting together the program for OSCON with the other program chairs, it occurred to me that by covering “just” open source, we weren’t really leaving out all that much of the software landscape. It seems open source has indeed won, but let’s not gloat; let’s make things even better. Open source has made many great changes to software possible, but the spirit of the founding community goes well beyond code. Read more…
A software engineer’s role traversal
Software engineer and author Jason Myers on changing roles in a changing market.
We often hear about how the tech job market is booming and has space for newcomers, but what does that mean for the developers already in the market? In December of 2014, Fortune.com predicted that 2015 would be an excellent year for developers to change jobs. Citing Dice.com, they note that jobs are popping up all over the country. In fact, Dice’s survey also reports 40% of hiring managers seeing voluntary departures, a higher number than was seen just six months earlier.
These are all large, general numbers. What does a job change, and the changing market, look like for individual developers? To get a better sense, I spoke with Jason Myers, who is working on our upcoming Essential SQLAlchemy, 2e title. Jason recently went from working for the email marketing service Emma, Inc., to working for networking giant Cisco. Here, he talks about how a change like that feels, and how the market looks to him.
3 simple reasons why you need to learn Scala
How Scala will help you grow as a Java developer.
With Scala Days nearly upon us, the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco will be awash with developers excited to share ideas and explore the latest use-cases in this “best of both worlds” language. Scala has come a long way from its humble origins at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, but with the fusion of functional and object-oriented programming continuing to pick up steam across leading-edge enterprises and start-ups, there’s no better time than right now to stop dabbling with code snippets and begin mastering the basics. Here are three simple reasons why learning Scala will help you grow as a Java developer, as excerpted from Jason Swartz’s new book Learning Scala.
1. Your code will be better
You will be able to start using functional programming techniques to stabilize your applications and reduce issues that arise from unintended side effects. By switching from mutable data structures to immutable data structures and from regular methods to pure functions that have no effect on their environment, your code will be safer, more stable, and much easier to comprehend.
Read more…
Software engineers must continuously learn and integrate
Four ways programmers can thrive in their careers.
As O’Reilly continues to build and assess our programming content ecosystem — now more than 30 years in the making — we have gone from covering a few key languages, operating systems, and concepts to a diversification of topics that would have made an editor’s head spin in the 1980s. Our goal, however, remains the same: to continue to provide practical content from experts who help you do your job. An important piece of that goal is to keep you informed as we interpret the trends on the horizon. What follows are a few of the core themes we are focusing on at the moment. Expect these to evolve and change with the speed of innovation.
You can also stay in the loop on the latest analysis and developments through our weekly Programming newsletter.
Actually be a software engineer
The term “full-stack” first emerged in a 2008 blog post (the original post is no longer available, but an archive is published here). The term perhaps reached its canonical definition in a post by Facebook engineer Carlos Bueno. He wrote:
“A ‘full-stack programmer’ is a generalist, someone who can create a non-trivial application by themselves. People who develop broad skills also tend to develop a good mental model of how different layers of a system behave.“
Whether you are striving to be a full-stack programmer, a T-shaped engineer, or you choose to rebuff those terms entirely as mere marketing, what now floats around as a “full-stack developer” definition is incomplete. Read more…