Staying Motivated

10/09/18 • 17 min

To progress in a development career requires motivation. An underlying personal need and goal to push your self to improve and grow. In this episode we talk with Nathan Dentzau (@nathandentzau), senior developer at Oomph Inc about being motivated. Nathan shares how he's motivated himself to grow in his career as a developer. We discuss where to find personal motivation and how to look to others for support. You have one career in development and its up to you to make it what you want.

Key Takeaways

Beyond the code, self assess what drives you to improve and grow.
Set goals to work towards, use those to inspire your career direction.
When you are not growing in the way you want, ask Why.

Links from this Episode

Previous Episodes Mentioned

Using D.U.M.B goals and S.M.A.R.T goals to grow your development career.

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Tweet Us: @devuppodcast
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Key Takeaways

Beyond the code, self assess what drives you to improve and grow.
Set goals to work towards, use those to inspire your career direction.
When you are not growing in the way you want, ask Why.

Links from this Episode

Previous Episodes Mentioned

Using D.U.M.B goals and S.M.A.R.T goals to grow your development career.

Have an idea for a future episode?

Tweet Us: @devuppodcast
Email Us: [email protected]

Previous Episode

Learning How to Adapt

Being able to adapt and alter approach due to changing requirements, technologies and methods is an important part of growing and thriving as a developer. With out doing so, there is risk of getting stuck or bottlenecked in your career. In this episode we talk with Brian Perry (@bricomedy), Senior Front End developer at HS2Solutions about learning how to adapt as a developer. Brian shares the methods he's learned from being an improv comic and former projet manager and how they have helped him be able to changes and grow in development. We discuss methods developers can use to adapt to changing project requirements, teams and technologies. Explaining how doing so will grow your career in ways you cant foresee.

Key Takeaways

The benefit of being adaptable is that you can adjust your approach and do not get stuck in a single path.
Use tools such as User Stories to define requirements, leaving the technical approach open to different options.
Keep a mindset of contsant learning to keep yourself open to new methods and approaches.
Talk with your team or peers on how they would approach a problem, to gain an understanding of different solutions.

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Previous Episodes Mentioned

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Next Episode

Communication Tactics

Central to being a successful developer is establishing tactics for communicating ideas, needs and tasks with other people. In this episode we talk with Heather Staudt, UX Product Manager at BioRAFT about communication. Heather outlines the importance communication plays on her team to correctly understand and explain development tasks and needs. We discuss why communication is an imperative part of any team, methods for to how to best communicate with others and things to remember when attempting to communicate technical details to less technical people. Having your code communicate with computers is important to your day to day success, but being able to communicate to the people you interact with is imperative to your long term career success.

Key Takeaways

Ninety percent of developer communication, it explaining technical topics to less technical people.
Learn what communication method or medium works for the person you want to communicate with and use that method.
Communication is not limited to the word you use, don't forget to use diagrams, drawings or even physical motion.