As a full-stack developer, it‘s a situation I‘ve faced more times than I can count. I‘m deep in the zone, working on a complex feature or refactoring some legacy code. Suddenly, a message from a product manager pops up on Slack: "Critical issue in prod! Customers are seeing errors on checkout. Can you investigate ASAP?"…
So you‘re considering shelling out $15,000 or more for a coding bootcamp in hopes of kickstarting a lucrative tech career. As a self-taught developer who now works as a full-stack software engineer, I‘m here to tell you that you might not need to drain your savings account or take on big loans to launch your…
Java‘s march towards more expressive, concise code took a significant step forward with the release of Java 10 and the introduction of the var keyword for local variable type inference. This addition, which allows developers to declare local variables without explicitly specifying the type, has been a resounding success, with widespread adoption and praise from…
I‘ve always considered myself a lifelong learner, but even I didn‘t imagine I‘d be diving into computer programming at 56 years old. You‘re never too old to learn new tricks, as the saying goes, but try telling that to my critical inner self, who seems to think I‘m crazy for attempting this. I‘ve affectionately named…
As a full-stack developer, you may think of semaphores as a low-level synchronization primitive used only by operating system developers. After all, modern high-level languages like Python already come with thread-safe data structures and easy-to-use locking mechanisms. Why would an application developer ever need to worry about something as esoteric as a semaphore? It turns…
The software development job market is more competitive than ever. According to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, nearly 35% of developers are actively looking for a job or open to new opportunities. Yet the same survey found that only 57.1% of developers were contacted by a recruiter in the past year, and a mere…
When Wendy McKenzie retired from her nursing career at age 58, she could have spent her days golfing, gardening, or perfecting her famous snickerdoodle recipe. Instead, the plucky Arizona resident decided to learn to code. Though she initially doubted whether her graying hair would fit in among the young hacker crowd, Wendy took the plunge…
In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, one constant remains: the need for new programming languages. As a full-stack developer with over a decade of experience, I‘ve seen firsthand how the languages we use to build software are in a state of constant flux, with new ones emerging to address the limitations of existing languages…
Learning to code is hard. Really hard. It‘s not unusual to spend hours debugging an issue only to discover you missed a semicolon, or days implementing a feature only to realize there‘s a better approach and starting over from scratch. According to recent studies, nearly a third of computer science graduates don‘t end up working…
As a full-stack developer, I dream of building software that is flawlessly architected, elegantly coded and blissfully free of pesky bugs. But then I wake up to reality. The cold hard truth is, no matter how skilled or rigorous you are, errors are inevitable. Especially once your application reaches any level of sophistication and scale….
In the rapidly evolving world of software development, aspiring coders face a dizzying array of choices when it comes to learning their craft. Dozens of programming languages, frameworks, and tools clamor for attention, each claiming to be the key to landing a coveted job in tech. Amidst this noise, coding boot camps have emerged as…
Three years ago, I made what I thought was one of the best decisions of my life – I enrolled in a Computer Science graduate program. Finally, I was taking concrete steps toward my dream of becoming a software developer. There was just one small problem. I had almost zero coding experience. Sure, I had…