Start your own blog.
Focus on a specific topic, explore it deeply and implement some non-trivial task, Blog about it.
Blog regularly, this will force you to stay sharp.
Care about yourself because nobody will. Health, sport activities, self-development and even learning new stuff needed for your job is only your own responsibility. For companies and managers you are just a machine without a soul writing a code.
Never be a patriot of any company and never try to do more then you are asked in any company if you don't have a legal ownership in it. You can be a great designer or an engineer, share whole your personality, creativity, ideas, you can try to help company grow, improve processes and everything else. The fact is, owners don't care about it, they will just ignore you, will follow only their own vision, politics and they always think they know how to do things much better then you in everything. Just save your time, energy and use it on self-development or creating own business instead.
When you make a decision to learn a piece of technology, don't stop till you master it and never ask in the middle "was it the better choice? is technology X is better than this? "
You can learn anything you spend the time to learn.
You will learn nothing without spending the time.
You will not learn everything.
Always allocate some time to spend not learning/coding/thinking about coding/preparing talks about coding. This is called relaxation and downtime and without it you will burn out.
Exercise, it would have been easier not to get that belly in the first place you chump.
You will have infinitely more challenges and troubles from people than code. "Soft skills" are actually really hard.
Most people in your industry will astound you with their generosity and friendship. Be open. Be generous. Give back.
Don't obsess over abstracting from the beginning. It'll get you stuck in infinite loops. Make your thing work, then tidy it up.
You might be good, but others are better. Put your pride aside and be willing to learn and listen to other's opinions and teachings.
Don't make it perfect, make it work. (By some means of course)
carefully pick one language and stick to it at first , but don't stuck on one language.
David Cresswell
Atef Ben Ali
Software Developer
DON'T GIVE UP !!