If you were to ask software developers about how to become a better programmer, the most common answer would be to practice and gain experience in the field. While learning and coding are indeed the main aspects of software development for obvious reasons, I feel that other facets are commonly overlooked and even taken for granted.
What aspects do I mean? Pretty much every action or behaviour that has a meaningful impact in the link between software development and our health, both physical and mental.
I believe it’s really easy for us to develop behaviours that have a negative impact on our health, while dropping them and instead creating behaviours that are beneficial is often very hard. Many of them do have either the potential to improve our life, or the potential to make it decay slowly. …
Maybe you are a student who needs to climb through mountains of homework each week while maintaining a good social profile and good health. You might be a hard working employee who needs to climb through mountains of emails and paperwork each week while maintaining a good social profile, a good health and even a family. Or maybe you are someone different.
Whichever is your case, maybe you’ve also considered learning to program or improving your skills. It’s often like a story we’ve heard a million times: be excited for learning… and go to bed without doing anything.
Regardless of who you are, where you work or study, who you talk to and how you manage each aspect of your life, if you are just a regular mortal like most of us, you have for sure struggled when spending your time. And I might add, you probably keep struggling with it to this very day. …
Whether we like it or not, money is a fundamental part of our everyday lives. We earn it through hard work (or luck) so we can spend it in products and services which we believe will give us value. The value that we get from our money can depend on many different variables and finding a way to get the most value is often difficult.
Traditionally, learning was something you could only do in a school or in a job, in the form of experience. If we consider that actually doing something is the best method for getting better at it, this meant that the only ways to improve were going to a school (university, if you wanted to learn a profession) or getting a job, where you must have previous experience in order to be hired. …
The fact that habits are usually hard to develop and, more importantly, maintain for a long time, is really nothing new. I’m pretty sure that almost everyone has at some point in their lives wanted to build a new positive habit or has known someone else who also did. Whether it was the habit of working out, eating a balanced diet or developing a healthy sleep schedule, it’s safe to say that everyone did it so their lives would improve in some aspects.
However, it’s very likely that you at least struggled to maintain that habit and in the “worst case”, you abandoned the habit completely. Spoiler: you’re not the first person to do this, nor the last one. There’s hundreds of self-help books, articles and conferences that talk about this, not only because it’s so common, but also due to the importance of habits in the process of becoming a better person and, in this case, a better developer. …
What language do I learn first?
This is one of the most popular questions made by developers from all around the world, even if they’re not beginners. Every year, new articles and videos are made featuring “The best programming languages to learn in 20xx” or “The languages that will get you a job”. Whereas there’s no harm done with this use, the common meaning of this expression probably isn’t the best direction to take.
There are hundreds of programming languages that accomplish all sorts of tasks, and dozens of mainstream languages used by companies and teams every day. …
You’ve spent hours playing video games and you know all the in’s and out’s about your favorite ones, but you have yet to solve one little detail: How can I turn my passion into something productive?
Streaming is paid like an actual job, right? Aren’t pro players really famous around the world? These are good options, however you might not be the best at charming crowds or the most skillful player, but instead you enjoy building things. That leaves you with the brilliant idea of developing your very own video game. What could go wrong?
The following days, you search all about game development, which engine and language will you use, how to get assets and, probably, you’ll watch your first video tutorial. While there are a lot of ways to learn to create and publish your own games, it’s safe to say that the majority of aspiring game developers use video tutorials a lot. …