Show HN: Coding Career Handbook

Since I switched careers from finance and started doing freeCodeCamp in 2017, I have been studying the principles, strategies, and tactics that make great developers successful and applying it to my own career. This has helped me get hired at a Senior level at AWS in just 3 years. While between jobs, I decided to take the time to write down everything I've learned about the tech industry - everything I wish I had known, everything I believe to be true, everything I think an individual contributor developer needs to build an exceptional career:

- Going from Junior to Senior

- Learning in Public

- Tech Strategy (the Business of Software)

- Why You Should Write (A Lot!)

- Engineering Career Ladders

- Developer's Guide to Twitter

- Marketing Yourself (without Being a Celebrity)

- and more!

Roughly 1/4 of the chapters are prior blogposts that have done super well - my greatest hits include https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/ and https://www.swyx.io/writing/marketing-yourself/ - and since publishing them I have loads of feedback and rewritten them for the book. The remaining 3/4 are brand new content I have applied for my own career, and market tested the messaging in tweets, talks and podcasts.

There's a launch discount applied to everything on the site; I hope you enjoy it!

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Side note on tech stack - For the book, I am using https://softcover.io which is a Rails app that Michael Hartl uses to create the Rails tutorial. It's the best tool I found that generates PDF/EPUB/MOBI out of the box with decent customization by exposing LaTeX (and its also FOSS, with a paid option!). For my site I am using Begin.com for hosting and functions, Svelte for components, and Podia for payments. For Audiobook I am using Audacity and my trusty standard issue Egghead.io Instructor Shure mic! Putting this together was a good couple weeks of trial and error - Let me know if I can answer any tech stack questions alongside book questions!

Distills much of the best advice you can get if you hang out for a few years on HN into an easily shareable package.

Would recommend as a graduation gift or career starter for the new tech person in your life. But also super valuable for folks who have been in the industry as well. The chapter on "Marketing Yourself" contains some reminders that I found really helpful:

- Keep online presence 90% positive

- Be consistent (same profile pic everywhere, etc)

- Be "The Guy" (or non-guy) for a specific, unique, easily-grasped value prop

- Don't chase celebrity or short-term optimizations (posting times, weekly metrics, etc)

edit: for those who don't know - forrest does a Cloud Resume Challenge where he helps people get started with a career in the cloud - laying out exact steps and offering his personal network to anyone* who completes them: https://forrestbrazeal.com/2020/04/23/the-cloud-resume-chall...

*he has 2 conditions, listed on the blogpost

(I’m sure it’s mentioned in the book, but I couldn’t help but ask anyway :])