wandercoding.com

Really, it’s all in here.  I don’t do an enormous amount of hawking my book on this site, but the other day, I realized that I’m doing a disservice by not pushing you into buying it.  Why?  It’s not because I want your money.  Buy it from Amazon for only $18.96 and it will pay for itself.  How does it pay for itself?  I’ll enumerate some of the reasons:

• Don’t screw up another interview, get the next job you apply for.
• Once you get offered the job, you’ll get a better salary and/or benefits by using some of my tips for tactful negotiation.
• You’ll improve your organization with your leadership skills you get by following some of the ideas on organizational and personal habits.
• You’ll keep your nose clean by avoiding risky practices that can get you in trouble with human resources and management.
• You’ll understand marketing and sales better and learn to work more effectively with them by understanding that it’s a partnership, not a leash.
• Your place in the software organization will improve because you’ll realize that it’s not just your coding that counts, it’s the intangibles as well.

It took me a long time to realize that my biggest benefit to my employers wasn’t my coding skills, but my leadership and big picture knowledge.  The sooner you read this book and come to the same realization, the sooner your career takes another step forward.

What you see might be indicative of what you don’t see.  I was looking for some software today to use at work.  I had it narrowed down to three choices, based on recommendations from people on various websites.  I read numerous comments and finally went to the three websites to investigate for myself.

Two of the products looked slick and their websites were polished and helpful, including documentation and screenshots for the product.  The third one, the most expensive of the three (although it was still pretty cheap) had the weakest website, relatively little information, no screenshots, no documentation – in other words, very little to instill confidence in me that they would have useful documentation or that their product would be complete either.

In an ideal world, I’d have time to thoroughly investigate all three products regardless of their initial presentation, but I needed to get my job started and if my first impression was bad, and I still haven’t found the other products useful, then I’ll give them a second shot later.

In the meantime, I needed some documentation to help get me started.  I found examples on the websites of the other two products and lists of features so I knew I wouldn’t have to leave the comfort of their environment to start using some command-line interface.  Yes, I’m a programmer, but I don’t go looking Toolsfor excuses to do more work than I have to.  If I can find a simple, easy to use UI that makes a job clear and easy and does all the messy work in the background, I’m in.