C3 Dev Festival

C3 Dev Festival 2024

The Talk explores the AI-assisted programming paradigm shift and the evolution of software engineering. It discusses the limitations of large language models (LLMs) and highlights the importance of balancing forces in software engineering. The future of programming is seen as models solving problems based on datasets. The Talk emphasizes the responsibility of creating a better future and the need to strike a balance between utilizing tools and building problem-solving skills. It also touches on the human dependence on AI and recommends resources for further learning.

Anyone who worked in tech, for any amount of time, knows that the landscape is in constant motion. The technologies of today are obsolete tomorrow. The tools of the trade are in constant motion, and continuous upskilling is the bread and butter of all software engineers who survive the passing waves. The software engineers of the future are those who mastered 1 skill: adaptation. In this talk, I will address the evolution of our craft, and my predictions for the core competencies of the future.

Adapting to the Future of Work in Tech

Bassem Dghaidi

TechLead Conference

TechLead Conference 2023

The role of a Tech Lead involves shaping the roadmap, helping the team be more effective, and working on important projects. Lessons learned include encouraging idea sharing, avoiding taking on all the work, and focusing on delegation. Tech Leads focus on the outcome, involve the team in decision-making, and make plans based on how different pieces will interact. The role of a Tech Lead is to focus on engineering and guide the team in figuring out how the whole system should fit together. Architecting can become problematic when it loses touch with the coding part, resulting in implementation issues.

Tech lead sounds like a lot of work. And not the fun coding kind either. Why would you ever want that? What does it feel like when you get it?In this talk Swizec explains why he took the step towards technical leadership, how his priorities changed, and why it means he’s doing more engineering than ever. A whole new world where writing code is the easy part.

On Becoming a Tech Lead

Swizec Teller

Imposter syndrome is a common experience that can lead to self-doubt and feeling like a fraud. The speaker shares their personal journey with imposter syndrome in school and throughout their career in software development. They discuss the challenges and doubts they faced, as well as the strategies they used to overcome imposter syndrome. The importance of support from managers, celebrating achievements, and sharing experiences to help others are highlighted. The talk emphasizes the need to embrace imposter syndrome and use it as a motivator for personal growth.

“Maybe I’m fooling everyone… I’m not good enough for this, and at this point, it is a question of time until everyone figures it out” these might be the words that cross your mind as your coworker compliments you for doing another fantastic job at delivering a new feature. As you grow in your career, so does your uncertainty. You put in the extra hours, learn all the new technologies, and join all the initiatives you can, but at the end of the day, it never feels enough. At this point, that feeling is leading your actions and decisions. It is the thing that is driving your career. Only one question persists: Are you really an imposter?

Imposter Syndrome-Driven Development

Daniel Afonso

Today's Talk covers the four building blocks of communication: people, message, context, and effective listening. It emphasizes the importance of considering the perspective of others and tailoring messages to the recipient. The Talk discusses different types and channels of communication, and the need to align them with the intended message. It also highlights the significance of soft skills in communication and provides techniques for effective communication and assessing soft skills in tech interviews. Cross-cultural communication and the impact of bluntness are explored as well.

Your communication skills affect your career prospects, the value you bring to your company, and the likelihood of your promotion. This session helps you communicate better in a variety of professional situations, including meetings, email messages, pitches, and presentations.

Effective Communication for Engineers

Naz Delam

React Summit

React Summit 2022

This Talk explores the concepts of impact and growth in software engineering. It emphasizes the importance of finding ways to make the impossible possible and the role of mastery in expanding one's sphere of impact. The Talk also highlights the significance of understanding business problems and fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation. Effective communication, accountability, and decision-making are essential skills for engineers, and setting goals and finding sponsors can help drive career growth. Feedback, goal setting, and stepping outside of comfort zones are crucial for personal development and growth. Taking responsibility for one's own growth and finding opportunities for impact are key themes discussed in the Talk.

Becoming a web engineer is not easy, but there are tons of resources out there to help you on your journey. But where do you go from there? What do you do to keep growing, and to keep expanding the value you bring to your company? In this talk we’ll look at the different kinds of impact you can have as a web engineer. We’ll walk through what it means to take on bigger, more complex projects, and how to scale yourself, and grow the community around you. By driving our own development we can all grow our impact, and in this talk, we’ll discuss how to go about this.

Impact: Growing as an Engineer

Iris Schaffer

React Summit 2024

Conflicts in software development often arise from the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer in the drama triangle. Shifting to a creator role helps navigate conflicts by focusing on learning and improving. Navigating conflict involves preventing rescue, providing feedback, and challenging others. Managers can play a crucial role as coaches instead of rescuers. By encouraging a shift to the empowerment dynamic, unnecessary drama and conflict can be avoided.

We all intend to grow and strive to make a bigger impact until conflict shows up. We view conflict as a negative thing that gets in the way of growth when it is both necessary and vital. In this presentation, I'll share my experiences and ideas on how you can handle conflict and stay on the path toward making an impact!

First Comes Conflict, Then Comes Growth

Wisam Zaghal

The Talk provides a personal human toolkit for debugging human interactions by focusing on depersonalization, understanding power dynamics, setting boundaries, managing emotions, repairing ruptures, and embracing repair. It emphasizes the importance of owning mistakes, recognizing power differentials, and speaking truth to those in positions of power. It also highlights the significance of setting boundaries, both emotional and temporal, and managing dysregulation. The Talk encourages investing in human debugging tools and learning to be better humans together.

In this talk you will learn timeless soft skills necessary to navigate interpersonal relationships with friends, coworkers, and reports. You will learn about emotional regulation, reframing, boundaries, radical ownership, and letting the fuck go.

Managing Ourselves Managing Each Other

Rachel Nabors

This talk explores the use of AI in the interviewing process for software engineering. It discusses the history of interviewing and the skills needed for future interviews. The speaker questions the relevance of traditional coding challenges and highlights the shift towards evaluating specific programming languages and debugging skills. The talk also emphasizes the importance of understanding the uses and limitations of AI and the value of communication skills in technical interviews.

Conducting Interviews and Interviewing in the Age of AI Tools

 Lindsey Simon

React Summit US

React Summit US 2023

This Talk discusses the unique mentorship journey of the speakers, who found each other through Coding Dojo and LinkedIn. They highlight the power of mentorship, emphasizing the value of having another woman in tech for support and guidance. The impact of mentorship is also emphasized, with the speakers encouraging others to be mentors and share their knowledge. They describe the mentor-mentee relationship as wonderful, inclusive, and supportive.

Finding mentorship when beginning your professional journey can be hard, yet it is so vital to have this support to build confidence, and grow at each stage of the process.  5+ years ago, Sidney reached out to me on LinkedIn with questions about bootcamps.  I was finishing my first year at Stitch Fix and from that first GoogleMeet call, we have now met nearly every month and followed and supported each other throughout our respective journeys in engineering.  We have never worked together, and we’ve never met!  Join us as we meet for the first time in person and talk about how vital our pairing has been!

The Unexpected Key Value Pair in Mentoring

Heather May

Sidney Buckner

React Advanced

React Advanced 2023

Open Source promotes accessibility, inclusivity, collaboration, innovation, transparency, and trust. Code reviews are a collaborative process in software development, with challenges including language barriers, documentation changes, and review backlog. Best practices for effective code reviews include clear objectives, focusing on the code, and using code review tools. Linters are important for scanning code issues, and measuring success in code reviews can be done using key metrics. React Code Reviews are crucial for the success of open-source projects.

In this lightning talk, we will explore the significance of code reviews in open source projects, specifically within the React ecosystem. We'll discuss the benefits of code reviews for maintaining code quality, encouraging collaboration, and upholding project standards. By emphasizing effective feedback, respectful communication, and the use of relevant tools, participants will gain practical insights on conductingimpactful React code reviews. Join me to learn how code reviews can enhance the development process, encourage knowledge sharing, and contribute to the success of open source projects in the React community.

React Code Reviews in Open Source: Ensuring Quality and Collaboration

Patrick Odey

This talk emphasizes the importance of writing technical documentation and provides tips for improving it. Technical documents help explain intentions, reasoning, and choices, reducing work volume and aiding troubleshooting. Writing technical documents is important for visibility, career progression, and communication with managers. Integrating documentation into the development tool chain and treating it like tests ensures its quality and keeps it up to date. Structuring technical documentation effectively and providing concise and clear information are key for boosting its usefulness.

Gathering pieces of information for a task or a project is a wasteful act and could result in duplicated work done by different people.Onboarding, your ability to maintain code or infrastructure and systems handover - Documentation plays a crucial part in all these processes.So... how can we write technical docs in an easy way &amp; why should we even do it? In this talk, I’ll show you a structured way to write technical docs, without being a technical writer - So you will deliver highly valuable information to your audience, to your best ability.I’ll explain why should you care about these docs, how do they serve your best interests (Yes, there’s more than one!) and what a wide impact it could make on employees and even on your entire organization.

Technical Documentation - How Can I Write Them Better and Why Should I Care?

Hila Fish

The Talk discusses the misconception that software career is a linear progression and shares a story of a software engineer turned engineering manager who wasn't happy. It explores the complexity of describing personality types in software engineering and the importance of considering talents, job meaning, and skill development when making career decisions. The Talk also emphasizes the significance of finding meaning in one's job, job crafting, and exploring different career paths. It concludes with the idea of challenging assumptions, assessing talents, and introspection for effective job crafting.

You start as a junior developer, happily delivering lines of code. Life is easy, you love your job, you are learning a lot. And then someone approaches you saying: "We need a tech leader for a new team, and you are the most experienced person available". You either become miserable or find your new calling, but your job is not really what it was before. And then someone approaches you saying: "We are looking for a new engineering manager, and you are the most experienced person available".Is that really the most optimal career path? What could we do differently? Let's have a look at your talents and the talents needed for the job.There are many different jobs in tech: writing code, leading teams, managing people and projects, helping others use your technology, teaching, research, debugging.

Do You Really Have to Become a Manager to Advance in Your Career?

Marek Kalnik

The Talk discusses the importance of negotiation, particularly in relation to the gender pay gap and gender parity. It emphasizes the need to address global reasons for negotiation and the impact of inflation and the cost of living. The Talk also highlights the values to consider when negotiating and provides tips on preparing for negotiation, making offers, and discussing perks. Recommended reading and references on negotiation are also provided.

A lot of us when changing jobs or accepting a promotion feel overwhelmed by the offer and either don't ask for more or ask a percentage more than the offer. Let's talk about why that's not enough and how we can change our attitudes towards negotiation.

Negotiate Like Your Life Depends on It

Shivangi Das

This Talk discusses the foundation, formation, and iteration of process, emphasizing the benefits and building trust. It highlights the importance of optimizing processes, using life cycles and meetings to streamline workflow and avoid mistakes. Exposing work through demos and documentation fosters collaboration and provides more exposure opportunities. The Talk also emphasizes concise communication, tailoring processes to individual team members, and addressing challenges through effective communication. Automation is recommended to save time and streamline workflow, while maintaining a balance with personal interactions.

One way to get a good groan from your team is to mention the word “process”. Engineers in particular worry that process will mean their momentum will get slowed or halted, and usually have experience to justify that worry. With an understanding of workflow and high-level individualization, this doesn’t have to be the case. As a tech lead and now manager that has converted many process skeptics, I’m excited to show you my processes for process.

Processes for the Process-Averse

Tara Z. Manicsic

If you're a human being, chances are you felt like an imposter at some point in your life. One of the biggest risks we have to deal with in our day-to-day life is failure. Acknowledge your feelings of self-doubt and be specific about why you're feeling this way. Embrace self-compassion and vulnerability to overcome imposter syndrome. Take action by reminding yourself of your qualifications, seeking help from colleagues, and setting realistic goals. Embrace vulnerability, build confidence, and create a safe environment for your team.

If you’re a human being, chances are you’ve felt like an impostor at some point in your life. One of the biggest issues with this syndrome is that is easy to get stuck with this feeling. One does not simply overcome Impostor Syndrome. It requires offering yourself compassion and vulnerability instead of judgment and self-doubt. But... how exactly do you achieve that? We'll look at techniques for achieving this and overcoming the syndrome.

How to Overcome Impostor Syndrome

Ursula Cervantes

This Talk explores the topic of mentorship, focusing on how to get a mentor without explicitly asking. It discusses the qualities of a good mentor and the importance of being a good mentee. The benefits of mentorship include personal growth, career advancement, and fostering a collaborative work culture. Strategies for finding mentors and mentees are provided, along with tips for navigating mentorship conversations. Overall, mentorship is seen as a powerful tool for learning, growth, and mutual support in the field of software engineering.

Mentorship has a reputation of taking a lot of time and work. But what if it wasn't? Here are ways to get a mentor, be a mentor, and how to navigate it. I have always worked on getting mentors in every corner of my engineering career. I have mentors that do not even know they are my mentor. But I like it that way. I will go into how to get a mentor at any stage of your engineering career and how to be a good mentor/mentee.

How to Get a Mentor Without Telling Them

Erin Fox

Pair programming is a collaborative software development technique where two developers work together at one workstation. It offers benefits such as easier code maintenance, faster code reviews, and reduced likelihood of bugs. Implementing pair programming involves finding compatible partners, setting goals, and establishing clear communication protocols. To address challenges, provide training and support, involve team members in decision-making, and carefully select partners. Pair programming can help achieve goals like collaboration, knowledge growth, code stability, and maintenance.

Engineering team often face difficult challenges with constrained resources. If the job requires 1 engineer, we put one on the job. If it requires 2, we split topics into actionable chunks and assign them to individuals. But there are several benefits to do things in pairs: It helps to catch errors and bugs, it allows for better communication and collaboration between team members and it can also lead to more efficient and higher-quality code, as engineers can challenge their peer's assumptions and suggest alternative approaches.

The Power of Pairs

Octave Raimbault

Today's Talk focuses on software rewrites, specifically the transition from jQuery to React. The speaker shares their experience of rewriting a jQuery app to React, highlighting the benefits of the rewrite in terms of improved user experience and increased conversions. Approaches to software rewrites are discussed, including the page-by-page approach which allows for product innovation. The speaker emphasizes the importance of prioritizing rewrites or refactors for startups. The Talk concludes with insights on testing, server-side functionality, and the overall value of the rewrite.

If you don’t have time to build it right, when will you have time to build it twice? In hyper growth startups the old adage breaks down. You get an expanding time horizon – IF you can get it shipped. An imperfect feature next week beats the perfect feature 2 months from now. Your code won’t matter if you’re dead. I didn’t believe this until I saw it myself. A startup on the cusp of hockeystick hired me to rewrite their jQuery app in React. Their tech proved the idea then became a burden. Over the next year we rewrote the whole app from scratch, grew a team of React experts, created a codebase that’s a joy to work with, and got the company to a $100,000,000 Series B. All because the early engineers knew that if the crappy version works out, there’s going to be time and resources to fix it later. This talk is about what I’ve learned while rewriting an app with users banging down the door.

You Do Have Time to Build it Twice

Node Congress

Node Congress 2022

The Talk discusses the relationship between complexity and collaboration in software development. It highlights that collaboration is not always the answer to solving problems and that communication is crucial in software development. The concept of collective intelligence is introduced, which describes a group's capability to perform well together across tasks. The study mentioned in the Talk shows that collective intelligence is transferable among tasks, and skilled players rely on nonverbal cues and understanding the software. Lack of understanding can lead to difficulties in team performance and deployment.

Orders of magnitude matter. Things don't go up order of one every time. Organising people in a group requires disseminating information and its interpretation and, most importantly, its distribution. Remote working and asynchronous collaboration have become the norm, meaning that distributed teams have taken their silos of knowledge with them. The impact of this has compounded any organisations experiencing a skills gap with a skills distribution problem, increasing the importance of good documentation and transparent interaction processes. In this session, we'll go over the fundamentals of requirements engineering, looking at how orders of magnitude scale alongside the expansion of scope and additional requirements. Lastly, we'll discuss how you can apply elements of platform thinking to your everyday projects. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Orders & Magnitude

Jessica Cregg

Freelancing has become a popular career path, offering stability, flexibility, and economic opportunity. Major corporations are increasing their use of freelancers, and freelancers enjoy the ability to work on their passions and hobbies. Negotiating contracts and analyzing market rates are important for freelancers to get paid appropriately. Building a strong brand and online presence is crucial for freelancers to attract clients. Platforms like TopTel offer exclusive networks, support, and vetted clients for freelancers.

Ready to kickstart your freelance career or just getting started on your freelance journey? You’re in the right spot. Learn the tricks of the trade from the industry’s most experienced freelancers. The independent talent movement is the future of work. If you’re considering leaving full-time employment for a career as a freelancer, now is the time to find your successful space in the independent talent workforce. More people are working freelance today than ever before, with the freelance marketplace now contributing $1.2 trillion to the US economy. Some of the most in-demand roles for freelancers right now are senior developers with professional experience in React, Python, Blockchain, QA, and Node.js. This workshop will help you design a sustainable and profitable full-time (or part-time) freelancing/contracting career. We will give you tools, tips, best practices, and help you avoid common pitfalls. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

How To Design A Sustainable Freelance/Contracting Career

Shane Ketterman

Alexander Weekes

TestJS Summit

TestJS Summit 2021

This workshop covers the essentials of building a sustainable freelance career, including transitioning from a full-time job, the challenges and benefits of freelancing, payment processes for non-US freelancers, insurance considerations, and the importance of building a personal brand. It also emphasizes the flexibility and freedom that freelancing offers, the importance of being part of a supportive network, and the opportunity to choose meaningful projects and clients. Additionally, it highlights the need for continuous upskilling and market research to stay competitive in the industry.

Would you like to pursue your passions and have more control over your career? Would you like schedule and location flexibility and project variety? Would you like the stability of working full-time and getting paid consistently? Thousands of companies have embraced remote work and realize that they have access to a global talent pool. This is advantageous for anyone who has considered or is currently considering freelance work. Freelancing is no longer an unstable career choice. This workshop will help you design a sustainable and profitable full-time (or part-time) freelancing career. We will give you tools, tips, best practices, and help you avoid common pitfalls. &gt;&gt; <a href="https://bit.ly/gn-portal-toptal-form2">Submit your interest</a> on becoming a freelance engineer with Toptal and get a call with Talent Acquisition specialist &lt;&lt; Table of contents: Module 1: Dispelling common myths about freelancing Module 2: What does freelancing look like in 2021 and beyond Module 3: Freelancing choices and what to look for (and what to avoid) Module 4: Benefits of freelancing from a freelancer + case study BREAK - SPEED CODING CHALLENGE Module 6: How to get started freelancing (experience, resume, preparation) Module 7: Common paths to full-time freelancing Module 8: Essentials: setting your rate and getting work Module 9: Next steps: networking with peers, upskilling, changing the world Module 10: Freelancer AMA SPEED CODING WINNER ANNOUNCED <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Designing A Sustainable Freelance Career

Rodrigo Donini

React Advanced 2021

Welcome to Remote Team Collaboration Techniques. Telecommuting has led to professional isolation and a lack of networking and mentoring. Companies are encouraged to adapt their work policies to the new reality of telework. Remote work has impacted stress levels and employee autonomy, but not productivity. GitHub and Jamstack are effective collaboration tools. Mob pairing promotes learning and progress in projects. Engaging in fun activities and taking breaks from work can boost team morale.

Whether your team has recently moved to a distributed setup or you’ve been working remotely for some time, keeping team collaboration up can be difficult. Working in a silo, not physically surrounded teammates can make morale and code suffer. I was fortunate to be on a team that found ways to not only make us feel united in building projects together but also as a team of people who could laugh, commiserate, and be open with each other. In this talk I’ll cover the techniques and tools teams have found that strengthen team bonds and morale while keeping up productivity and collaborative project work. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Remote Team Collaboration Techniques

TechLead Conference 2024

As it is with many developers, his path to coding was not straightforward. And looking at Shawn's bio, it's apparent he applied that experience to his whole career: he's the head of developer experience at Temporal.io, author of a bestselling book on progressing career in IT, and a sought-after mentor and speaker. His number one advice? “Marketing is not beneath you.” What led you to software engineering?My first career was in finance, and I did a lot of trading of currency derivatives and stock portfolios. We had to do a lot of number crunching in Excel, Python, and then Haskell. I was the guy putting together all that data. I didn't call myself an engineer, but I was writing software. I saw that there are many good ideas in software engineering that I should learn and that once I do that, my life will be significantly better. So I left finance and went through a boot camp to learn all the software engineering practices. My first job was at two Sigma as a front-end engineer. Then I joined Netlify as a developer engineer and then AWS. What is the most impactful thing you ever did to boost your career?This will sound very similar to Ken's thing, and it's called learning in public. I did it when I was at Sigma because I wasn't learning much at work. I was in New York City, there were many meetups, and I decided to give myself my own mentors speaking there, writing blog posts, sharing them, and just finding more ways to grow apart from inside of my company. And I realized that it was way more effective than just waiting for the right boss or co-worker to teach me.Also, the dev community has been so welcoming and supportive. You learn, share what you've learned, and people will correct you if you're wrong. And once you're wrong, you will never forget what you have been learning. So if you have a pretty thick skin and a low ego, you can learn a lot. In fact, with my most recent job, I wrote a blog post about what I thought was missing in the serverless ecosystem based on what I had seen at AWS and Netlify. Someone commented on my blog, a VC read the comments and hired that guy to head the products at Temporal. And then that guy turned around and hired me based on that blog post. For me, learning in public has opened up jobs and speaking opportunities on multiple continents. And I've made a lot of friends who are genuinely interested in technology.What would be your three tips for engineers to level up their career? Understand that some marketing is unavoidable and that knowing how to market yourself authentically is not scammy. It's not beneath you. It's what you need to do to get people to know you, your skills, and the quality of your work. A lot of developers have a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality, and it does not serve them very well. Invest some time into developing your marketing and understanding how to market yourself. I have a blog called How to market yourself without being a celebrity. When people look at marketing, they see the celebrity path, the influencer path. But many people don't want to be an influencer, so they'll say: "No marketing for me!" Let's disconnect those two things. Also, there's a difference between marketing yourself internally within your company — which you should always do — and marketing yourself externally with other developers.My second tip is to clone open-source apps. Clone something that already exists so that you stop making all these little product decisions. Maybe your implementation will be better, which is great; that's how the industry improves. And if it's worse, you start to understand the underlying trade-offs of your project. And a third one?Many people have the cold start problem when it comes to networking and content creation. Yes, you will not get much response when you start. So the way to guarantee response is what I call a "pick up what they put down" approach. If you want feedback, start giving feedback, mainly whenever people put out something new.When somebody you respect publishes a new demo, a new library, a new blog post, or a new workshop, summarize it, respond to it, react to it. Not with a YouTube reaction video, but actually respond to the meat of the content. Ask questions: Do you agree? Do you disagree? What else can you do with this implementation? Pick up on the things. Find bugs in the demos and the libraries, and you're guaranteed to get a response from that.I think that's an excellent starting point because these people are already influential. Almost definition, they have more ideas, and they know what they do. You work with them, become a collaborator. Eventually, you start to disagree with them, and you feel forced off into your own path. That's, I think, a great way to get started. You are now working on developer experience at <a href="https://temporal.io">Temporal.io</a>. What does it entail?Temporal is an open-source microservices orchestration system, which you could compare to Apache Airflow or AWS Step Functions. But we're better. There's a core server that is open source, and then there's all this stuff around it that needs to reach developers: documentation, developer relations, web UI, and SDKs. And I'm the head of developer experience helping each team in those areas. They are not essential to the server itself but important to how developers experience the product. I have overarching excitement in my career about helping technologies cross the chasm. I'm not sure who came up with the term, but the idea is that when you switch over from early adopters to a broad audience, there is a big gap in the middle where you have to fill in a lot of gaps with developer experience. That's what I focus on. Do you have some rituals or tools that keep you focused and goal-oriented?I try to do time blocking. For example, interview calls are on Fridays, which gives me focus on work from Mondays to Thursdays. Within the day, you have different time blocks as well. And if you can block off time for yourself too, I think you can get a lot more done.Apart from your daily job, you are a writer and speaker, and you recently published The Coding Career Handbook. What inspired you to write it?Mostly the feedback from my essay on learning in public. It was the most impactful piece of writing I've ever done; it reached over a million people. I can write about technical stuff, and I think it would be easier to sell, but React will be over someday. The thing that will not be over is career stuff, the evergreen things. When I decided to write the book, I had some time between my Netlify job and my Amazon job. So I wrote a poll, and the one with the more enthusiastic response was the career stuff. For whatever reason, this is the most valuable topic to my readers. Also, I think there's a gap in the market for leveling juniors and seniors. You can find many materials on how to learn to code and crack the coding interview. And then there's a big gap. But many people are coming into tech as juniors, and there's a lot of companies wanting to hire seniors — and nobody focuses on developing juniors into seniors.So I'm trying to contribute my thoughts as well as the thoughts of others. I collected 1,500 references to other people's ideas on becoming a senior engineer in the book. And I think if I keep at this — this is version one — I will build it up into the ultimate resource on how to become a senior engineer. And if you were to highlight one idea from your book, which one would it be?I'd say the most underappreciated part of my book is the strategy section — the importance of picking the right thing to work on rather than just being a clean coder or choosing the right tech stack. Understanding how money is made from your software is key to selecting the right company and positioning yourself correctly within the company. You are also very active in the community: you've contributed to several other books, have a <a href="https://twitter.com/swyx">34k+ following on Twitter</a>, helped to run the React subreddit... How has it impacted your career?It helps you to know everybody. It allows you to understand what's going on. I'm typically the source of news to my team, and they appreciate that. Also, if you're friends with everybody, you don't have to know everything — it's all coming from that community. What open-source projects would you recommend keeping an eye on or contributing to?I left the React community because I was getting more and more interested in Svelte. I do think it is an underrated framework for front-end developers. It's not for everybody, but I think it solves a good set of problems, including state management, styling, and animation. At React, we still don't have good answers for these things after all these years.What pieces of your work are you most proud of?Mostly the community behind the coding career handbook. I set up a semi-private Discord channel for people who opt into the community, and seeing people get jobs, double their pay when they go from junior to senior — that's really exciting. It's a great place for discussion where you can be totally honest. Realizing that that's something that I can do for ten years and not get bored of it, that's something I'm proud of.<a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"></a>

Shawn Swyx Wang's career tips: Knowing how to market yourself is not scammy

Shawn Swyx Wang

React Finland

React Finland 2021

I focus on why inclusion is important in hiring and what are the inclusive hiring practices for any organization that could be taken into use. Inclusive hiring and evaluation process are the great window of opportunity that can truly support inclusion with practical actions. I offer practical tips and a way to implement small changes while working the way towards more inclusive hiring culture and strategy. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

How to avoid bias or exclusion when recruiting

Emmi Marjetta

You can check the slides for Nasim's talk <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dv0ZOFDTitrUHJfJAgKs6YiO4M8Fxwcs/view"></a><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dv0ZOFDTitrUHJfJAgKs6YiO4M8Fxwcs/view">here</a><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dv0ZOFDTitrUHJfJAgKs6YiO4M8Fxwcs/view"></a>. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Reasons why we need inclusion

Nasim Selmani

React Summit Remote Edition

React Summit Remote Edition 2021

During this Talk, the speaker emphasizes the importance of negotiation skills in the tech industry and how it can help grow one's career. Mirroring and labeling are discussed as effective techniques in building trust and reducing negative emotions. The concept of being a sponge is introduced, highlighting the significance of listening attentively in negotiations. The Talk concludes by emphasizing the importance of communication and negotiation skills for engineers and encourages self-reflection and improvement.

When people ask me the most important skill I can learn to become better at my job and get promotions, I always tell them: The art of communication and human interaction. When working as engineers we are interacting with many people on daily basis. It is crucial for us to learn how to negotiate and persuade people. In this talk, we will cover 3 main techniques to become a better negotiator. these techniques can help us interact with others more effectively, get our projects approved, get promoted easier and even help us in our life. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

#soft skills