Where is your career going? What are the secrets of finding a great job in tech, passing the interview, and working well in a development team? How can you plan and negotiate your promotions, pay rises, and contracts? How do you become a master of your technical craft? Does your future lie in management or on the staff engineer track? When is it time to launch your own business, and how can you succeed as an independent engineer? This book has the answers. Includes free updates for life.

Reviews

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “The book I wish I’d had when I was starting out. I can’t recommend it enough.”
—Jon Bodner (author of Learning Go)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Full of wise, compassionate, and inspiring life advice for software professionals.”
—Judith Siegel

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “This book contains a lot of very well-written distilled perspective and lessons that I've learned on a harder, longer path.”
—Ivan Fetch

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I really loved reading this book. It will be valuable for everyone, from those starting their career today, to those already well entrenched in the industry.”
—Anish CR

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “This great book addresses a lot of the situations a new person in tech will most likely face in their career and offers actionable tips and suggestions.”
—Pedro Sandoval

About the book

I’m a software engineer, consultant, and writer with over four decades of experience in tech. In this practical, readable, and (I hope) occasionally amusing guide to software careers, I distil the lessons of many years into the ultimate source book for anyone who wants to succeed in tech.

Based on interviews with dozens of successful tech professionals, and featuring hundreds of practical, actionable tips, Code For Your Life is a complete manual for your career. It’ll show you how to get started, how to change jobs at the right time and for the right reason, and how to build a life you won't need a vacation from.

What you’ll learn

Among the insights you'll find in the pages of Code For Your Life are:

• How to choose the broad direction of your career: towards seniority, management, or independence

• The secrets of recruitment, job hunting, brand building, and marketing your skills

• Mastering the tech interview, whiteboard challenges, and take-home tests

• A principled guide to negotiating your pay and contract courteously, firmly, and effectively

• Unlocking the power of focus, deep work, and commitment management

• Taking control of your own skills development, training, and staying relevant in a fast-changing world

• Interpersonal skills: how to give gentle and effective code reviews, and pair programming that really works

• Working with people: empathy, courtesy, visibility, collaboration, relationships, and trust

• Your career path: startup, management, or staff-plus engineer? How to choose what's right for you

• Managing up, communicating, learning your way around the organisation, and how to get the promotion you want

• Freedom from money worries through sensible planning and budgeting

• How and when to branch out on your own, and succeed as the leader of an independent business

See the Table of Contents for a more detailed look.

What you get

Your digital download is a ZIP file containing the book in PDF format. This should be suitable for any ebook reader, Kindle, computer, phone, or tablet.

You can read a sample chapter in PDF format:

• Chapter 5: Work (sample)

Updating to the latest edition

All my books come with free updates for life, so if you’ve bought a previous version of this book, here’s what you need to do to get the latest edition. Click the link in your original download email (make sure you save this, as it’s your key to future updates). You’ll see what looks like an error page saying your download link for the old edition has expired, but that’s okay: click the link in the text, and you’ll be sent a new download email for the current edition.