🚀 Boost your career
Hello Hello!
🤣 by Jason McLead
Today I bring to you a recording of my presentation about career in tech, a book review, and access to Stack Overflow in prisons.
Beyond The Code - Boost your career
👨🏫️ This was a presentation I did just yesterday (Friday Jan 13, 2023) to the students of my great friend Vladimir Cezar. He teaches a Mobile Development course at Algonquin College in Ottawa. He invited me to talk about career in tech.
This presentation has the same title of the book that I have been working on and I talk about 3 approaches that any developer (or technologist in general) can use to stand out from the crowd and give them a better chance to get the job they dream of.📓 This is a book review. A book that was published 20 years ago but has timeless lessons that coders can apply today and through their careers: "The Pragmatic Programmer".
I was fortunate to have interviewed Andy Hunt, the author, for The SoloCoder Podcast. We had a great conversation and you can check it out here.
This review goes chapter by chapter and provides a summary of each one, together with the article authors experience, which is not that large as he just recently graduated.
If you are not planning to ready the book, this article will give you the gist of it.⚖️ I hope you will never go to jail, so maybe this won't have a practical use for you, but I think this is an inspiring story related to code and I decided to bring to you.
One aspect of the justice system is trying to rehabilitate detainees so that when they are released, they can become productive members of society again. Whether this is generally achieved or not, is up for discussion.
Education is part of rehabilitation, and coding programs in prisons are not uncommon. But here is a challenge: prisons don't provide internet access for prisoners. Something that we take for granted is search on google for questions to our coding problems which very often leads us to Stack Overflow. Detainees cannot do that.
Solution: Take Stack Overflow Offline! This article describes an initiative to bring Stack Overflow Dataset to prisons so they can have access to search it when they are learning how to code.
Jessica Hicklin was in prison for 26 years until she was released and she is now helping to bring Stack Overflow to the detention system in the US on her new role as the CTO of Unlocked Labs - You can hear her story here.
My personal update:
🐝 The past week was my first full week of the year. Busy bee: Very rushed but I'm happy with all that I've done, from personal, to college, and work, all got done. No one left behind. All my 5 teaching sections started well this week.
- 🎙️ I booked an interview with Jon Skeet - one of the all time high Stack Overflow contributors! As I was writing the chapter about becoming a Stack Overflow contributor for the book, I realized that I only had one story and I needed two. So I sent 8 emails inviting various contributors to be interviewed for The SoloCoder Podcast, and I got one of the top! The chat with Jon will be this coming Thursday. I will let you know how it went in the next newsletter.
- 🍿 I've been watching Kaleidoscope on Netflix. No final verdict yet, but I'm enjoying.
“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” — Abraham Lincoln.
Cheers, hasta la vista and bye!
Did someone send you this? Subscribe here!