The Passionate Programmer Igor Morozov By Chad Fowler

What the book is about?  Not about struggling to maintain the level of mediocrity required not to get fired;  Strategy for creating a radically successful career in software development;  Cultivating the desire to live a remarkable life;  43 pieces of advice, supplied with examples and comparisons between music and IT;

About author Chad Fowler  Had an unfinished musician degree;  Brief career of a saxophonist;  Then software developer and project manager;  Made a trip to India for recruiting people;  Currently a Ruby developer

Don’t build your career around a specific technology  Company, that owns this technology, may go out of business;  The technology itself may become obsolete;  “Market leader” and “standard” are not synonyms;  So invest your time in multiple technologies, better try out a dozen of them and form your tastes;

Be the worst  The people around you affect your performance. Choose your crowd wisely;  When choosing a team to work with, try to be the worst by level;  Due to instinctual herd behavior, people fit in with superior teammates;  Plus, you’ll find out that you’re not as bad as you thought and this will give you additional inspiration

Don’t listen to your parents  Parents usually consider safe variants for their children: just earn money and stay away from getting the sack;  A generation ago job certainly wasn’t fun, now it can be;  In our industry it’s OK to change jobs;

Practice, Practice, Practice  Explore your language’s APIs and function libraries  Study new programming areas  Practice in writing elegant code (codehunter.com)  Participate in competitive programming (topcoder.com)

Be a Mind Reader  Listen carefully to manager’s thoughts of which features to add to the project;  Or anticipate them if you can;  However, don’t implement mind-read feature if it will somehow limit the system;  Or if it requires much of the company’s resources;

Learn to love maintenance Why is maintenance work not attractive?  Lack of funding  Dealing with bad legacy code Advantages of maintenance:  Just a few responsibilities  Freedom to refactor code and unexpectedly implement something new;  Ability to directly interact with users;

Stop working after-hours  It’s better to think “I have only 8 hours! Go, go, go!”  Having more time to work reduces the value of time, which results in laziness at work and reduced productivity;  The end of a working day should be a strict deadline for the piece of work, otherwise it nags the worker afterwards;

Learn how to make mistakes  Raise the issue as soon as you know about it;  Take the blame for it;  Offer a solution (or a way to find a solution);  Don’t refuse help out of pride;  Remember: you’re showing your true face when dealing with errors.

Learn when to say ‘No’  Saying “yes” to avoid somebody’s disappointment is as good as lying;  And at work lying tend to cost much money for the company;  Refusing to do the work with objective reasons or at least saying “I don’t know” is much better;  Although you should keep balance between “yes” and “no”;

Other advice: at work  Remember who you work for and match your goals to his/her  Live in the present, don’t think about promotion as an ultimate goal;  Think about how much money you deliver to your company vs. how much you cost  Don’t feel irreplaceable  Don’t panic

Other advice: beyond work  Know your business domain  Invest in your intelligence  Mine existing code for patterns and tricks;  Be a generalist and a specialist;  Find a mentor and be a mentor to someone

Thanks for attention!