Why this blog?

I had a month of unemployment and thought what could I do that I both enjoy doing and would be of use to people. I’ve helped various people with their IT careers & skills over the years and thought this is something I was good at doing. But rather than helping one person at a time. Why not help potentially thousands with such information? Hence, “TechjobMentor” was born.

The journey

I brainstormed a list of topics (later in this post) to get an idea of what sort of branding and domain name I would use for the blog. I wanted to see if the topics would be specific or more general towards IT and if I would get stuck early on with what topics to write about. As it turns out, it was rather mixed and it was pretty easy to come up with such general topics I could talk about for hours. From this, I created “TechjobMentor” with the idea of helping people get a paid job in the corporate tech world, survive within it and hopefuly get promoted time after time or settle doing a role they are happy doing.

I created StaticGenie as an open source project to also keep me busy during my unemployed time, give a little something back to the open source community and have fun programming again. Knowing it’s a product I would use for this blog (although at the time I didn’t know what it would be called). Once StaticGenie was at a point in development that it could generate blogs I started developing designs for TechjobMentor using software called Gravit. I converted the designs to what you see now. There’s still quite a few things I need to add to this blog but felt I’d get a few posts on here for feedback from friends and family first. Such things still to do include;

• Setup email newsletter for new posts and potential discussions/feedback
• Finish other pages (such as about, contact, credits, etc)
• Links to my personal LinkedIn profile where readers can see my skills, join my personal projects and get in touch (although might just leave this in the about page)
• Setup feedback box in the footer & on the contact page
• Setup some form of social media sharing of posts
• SEO optimisation
• Create some post structure templates
• Install Google Analytics
• Schedule to write posts every other weekend (no idea if I’ll be able to keep to that schedule but will soon find out)
• etc…

Feedback will eventually shape this blog into what its readers, such as you want. But until then, there needs to be some posts to start generating such feedback that can form the basis of directing this blog in the right direction.

Topics Ideas

• Another readers real CV breakdown (with permission)
• The 3 company cultures explained
• Importance of a two way interview
• If you don’t know, don’t be scared to say (or you may pay with your job)
• Why juniors should specialise & show passion, not generalise
• How to spot quality code in 30 seconds
• Focus on what you’re solving, not the solution
• How to find what the interviewer wants
• Perfect tech stack or language that doesn’t exist
• High Availability, Domain Driven Architecture, Infrastructure as Code, all explained
• Automation - It’s an investment and here’s why
• The test pyramid explained like I’m 6
• Eval() = Why exploratory & integration testing gets misused & it’s symptoms
• Why Westrum works, but is so difficult to achieve
• Top 5 mistakes a senior programmer makes
• Top 5 mistakes lead programmers make
• Top 5 mistakes junior programmers make
• Top 5 habits to a better tech career
• Contractors - The love em or hate em breakdown
• Why the size of the company may not be right for you
• How to play the companies political game
• How to breakdown a solution into code chunks
• 10 things to get your first junior job
• 10 reasons you haven’t been promoted yet
• Quality code will get you noticed by programmers, not managers
• How to disagree without getting fired
• How to convert spaghetti code into enterprise code
• Implementing CICD in legacy tech stacks
• Why monitoring systems open doors for promotions
• Why employers don’t want you to stay relevant
• Stay relevant for you - don’t let the company control your career
• Importance of lead by example & empathy
• Difference between frameworks, libraries & languages
• Waterfall, wagile & agile - how to spot them
• How to implement SOLID when not all your team understand how
• Applying lean six sigma to the value stream
• How to present a tech strategy to a mixed audience
• Real life use case for factory patterns
• Marketing - The (accidental) destroyer of websites
• Company Hierarchy vs Flat - Why flat wins
• What is a product strategy?
• Feature creep slaps you after you’ve done the hard work
• Value = Customer Needs. Why this is so difficult
• Optimum team structure (Agile)
• Identifying employee motivations - often not money
• My top 5 youtube channels for being a better person
• My top 5 programming books
• The 3 design patterns every programmer should know
• Creating a real product from capturing requirements to build and marketing
• What makes a great leader?
• How to stop a company seeing you like a number
• How to improve your odds at landing your first junior job
• Top 5 tips from recruiters to help get a pay rise (and my comments)
• Understanding peoples roles within software development (and where you fit)
• Why I keep this one thing off my CV
• Deconstructing a junior js developers CV (with permission)
• How to get a pay rise, the RIGHT way (yes, there is a right way)
• What your employer doesn’t know they are looking for in an interview
• How to conduct a technical interview - when you don’t know the tech
• Recongising the difference between a stepping stone job & a career
• Emotional intelligence gives you a sharp edge and here’s why
• Code camps are unlikely to get you a tech job on their own - here’s what’s missing
• What makes a junior, senior and lead?
• Why it’s important to distribute authority - but derisk too