I'm Writing A Book!
Tags: career, webdev
Published: 2020-04-10 17:17:35

---
title: I'm Writing A Book!
published: true
description: I'm writing a Dev Career Advice book... and I'm scared shitless!
tags: Careers, Webdev
---

## TL;DR

I'm writing a Dev Career Advice book! It will have all my best thoughts for early career devs looking to go from Code Newbie to Senior Dev. ~~I'm putting up [100 copies for presale](https://gumroad.com/l/bAZJq/Presale) for 50% off!~~ You can now find the book on it's own site at [www.LearnInPublic.org](https://www.LearnInPublic.org/)!

If you'd like behind-the-scenes update of the book writing process, you can follow [the Book's Twitter account](https://twitter.com/Coding_Career) or [the IndieHackers page](https://www.indiehackers.com/product/cracking-the-coding-career).

## A little about Me

Hi, I'm [swyx](https://twitter.com/swyx)! 👋

Deconstructing career success is a passion of mine. Throughout my own career change journey, I have been looking for common traits among top performers and trying to reverse engineer their formulas for success.

I've applied them to my own career with great results. I went from [deciding to learn web development in 2017](https://medium.com/hackernoon/no-zero-days-my-path-from-code-newbie-to-full-stack-developer-in-12-months-214122a8948f), to starting my first dev job in 2018, to getting hired as a senior dev at a top tech firm in 2020!

## Why I'm Writing This Now

I have an extensive track record of technical and nontechnical blogging. Yet, my best received posts have been career advice pieces, helping hundreds of thousands of developers:

- [Learn in Public](https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public)
- [The Ultimate Hack for Learning In Public: Pick Up What They Put Down](https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public-hack)
- [How to Learn in Private](https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-private)

I could write a technical book for my first book, but somehow my gut tells me that a "soft skills" one would help a lot more people, especially those who have recently decided to start a dev career.

## Topics Covered

Learning is just the tip of the iceberg as far as savvy career building goes. Here are some juicy topics I have planned:

- **Dev Careers By the Numbers**: An examination of the facts we have on dev careers
- **The Operating System of You**: We humans mostly run on the same hardware. It makes sense that performance differences are strongly influenced by the software we run - primarily our "operating system"!
- **Tests Are Your Friend**: In more ways than one...
- **When Ignorance is Power**: how to turn your impostor syndrome into a strength
- **Marketing Yourself Without Being a Celebrity**
- **Know Your Tools**: A poor craftsperson blames their tools. A rich craftsperson knows them inside out.
- **Betting on Technologies**: How to place your career bets (and cut your losses EARLY)
- **Developer's Guide to Twitter**
- **The Benefits of Writing A Lot For Your Software Career**
- **Don't Go Home With Nothing**
- **You Need A Domain**
- **The Price of your Ego**: You can learn so much on the Internet, for the low, low price of your Ego
- **Startups vs BigCos**: Interviewing, Financial Outcomes and Career Growth
- **How and When to Go Remote**: Advice for devs who want to succeed as remote devs!
- **From Junior to Senior**: How do you get to the next level?
- What else do you want me to cover? 🤗

[A full Table of Contents is available on the Gumroad page](https://gumroad.com/products/bAZJq/).

## That's Great!... What's it Called?

Believe it or not I spent hours agonizing over this question. I think I finally have an answer:

My new book will be called [**The Coding Career Handbook**](https://www.LearnInPublic.org/)! 🎉

I am starting to write it *today*. So it's definitely not ready for purchase yet, but if you'd like to show some support and win my undying gratitude, ~~[I'm putting up 100 copies for presale here with a 50% discount!](https://gumroad.com/l/bAZJq/Presale)~~ you can [buy a presale copy here](https://www.LearnInPublic.org)!

I'll keep posting excerpts on this blog, and take and respond to your questions as I go along.

It's really hard to write career advice when I'm just one person. This is the scariest, most uncomfortable thing I've done in years. But I believe I can help those of you who choose to join me on this journey, and want to build exceptional dev careers!