Education – Gameplay Coder

How to Create a Blog That Boosts Your Software Development Career

Hey guys.

No updates for Thunderjack! in this post, but they’ll be back soon.

This post, I wanted to take some time to reiterate why I created this website.

I previously mentioned in my article, The “Taking Control Of Your Life” Contract, that I’ve been following John Sonmez for a while now. He is the founder of Simple Programmer, a company that helps software developers improve themselves, both professionally, and personally.

In efforts to improve my career as a freelance gameplay programmer, I found John Sonmez, SP, and his free course on creating a blog. This inspired me to go, “You know what? Fuck it. I’m gonna take the plunge, start start this blog, and see what happens”. 😠

It’s a five-part course that goes over several topics, such as getting set up with web hosting, choosing a theme, coming up with post ideas, and a very important aspect, remaining consistent. The course is split up into sections, and each section contains actionable to-do items that break down the process of getting started.

Staying consistent in keeping your blog updated at some regular interval is so important and is . I’ve made a commitment to one post per week. Occasionally, I can squeeze two in there, but as long as I can post at least once, I’m fine.

At the end of the course, John would like you to share his free course, and talk about it on your blog. Hence this article ✔

If you’re a software developer of any kind, and you do not have a blog, I invite you to consider starting one. A blog can help with improving your job opportunities, get your name out there, and establish yourself as an authority in your area of expertise. It will take time (think years). It won’t be a success overnight, and there are no guarantees that anything will happen.

John has one of many videos about blogging:

Finally, on a side note, John also has a book out called Soft Skills, which is a book that helps you to improve on that that – your soft skills. It covers topis like marketing yourself, learning how to learn, improving your career, productivity, and even fitness, finances, and spiritual balance. While the book is geared towards software developers, anyone can read this book. It’s an awesome book; I highly recommended it.

Well that’s it for this article. Look forward to additional on developing those soft skills.

Thanks for your continued support. I’ll talk to you next time. Take care.

– C. out.

Creating a Blog to Boost Your Career

Hey.

Putting yourself out there can be a challenging task. At least it is for me.

As I am working to advance my career, I’ve been hearing a lot about putting out your own content. Owning your own online space. I mean a space you can really call your own. YouTube is an excellent resource, but you don’t own the platform. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are also great resources, but you don’t own those platforms, either, no matter how long you’ve been on them, how many posts or videos you’ve made, how many followers you have, or how many likes you get.

What I’m talking about is having your own website or blog, hosted on a domain that YOU OWN. And on there is where you can post all your content. Content is king. More content! Om nom nom, rawr, rawr, RAWR!!

I’ve been following John Sonmez for quite some time now. He’s an highly successful entrepreneur, and author of two best-seller books, Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual, and The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide. He’s also the founder of Simple Programmer, a site which helps software developers advance their careers, on both the technical and interpersonal sides. He also provides coaching in several areas of life such as business, health and fitness, personal finance, and mental & social advancement. He also created over 50 online courses for Pluralsight, which is a software developer training platform. I don’t want to seem remiss by leaving things off here, but in a nutshell, he provides lots of value to his customers, clients, and followers.

One of John’s products is a blogging course, Creating a Blog to Boost Your Career. It’s a free 5-part e-mail course that will help get you set up with starting and hosting your own blog website. It will walk you through finding hosting, coming up with ideas to post about, and getting traffic.

If you’re wondering how to take your software development career to the next level, be it getting a higher paying job, a raise, more freelancing clients, or raising your freelance rates, a blog may be just what you’re looking for. I’d recommend giving this free course a try.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
– C. out.

Amazing Design Document on Breakout

Hey.

After completing the Android Course and earning a Nanodegree, I resumed a course that I had started earlier. Actually, since I haven’t made any progress on the course in a long time, and much of its material was revamped, I decided to start the course over.

I’m talking about the Complete C# Unity Developer 2D – Learn to Code Making Games course, by Ben Tristem and Rick Davidson.

This is an amazing course that teaches you how to build several genres of games using Unity (version 2018 as of this writing).

One of the projects in the course is a Breakout type game (* gasp! *), and there is a reference to a design document about the Breakout genre on Gamasutra.

This. Document. Is. Fuckin’ Incredible! It contains tons of juicy pieces of information from level design and power-ups, to visuals, and even some history.

The power-up items intrigued me most. The items I added are either ones that I’ve seen somewhere else, or they were a coincidence (the bombs was a big one).

No update on Brickout this week. Still, this design doc definitely has some good inspiration for anyone wanting to make their own Breakout game engine – or if you’re lookin’ to hire someone to help you build your own – hint hint 😉

~ C. out.

Received Android Basics Nanodegree!

Hey.

After spending the last eight months (and some late nights) learning, coding, more learning, and more coding, it is done! I have completed the Android Basics course offered by Udacity and Google!

This started at the beginning of the year with a Scholarship Challenge that was open to 50,000 applicants, where you could choose one of the four courses offered:

Intro to HTML + CSS
Offline Web Applications
Android Basics
Developing Android Apps.

These courses are three months, and you have the opportunity to qualify for a full Nanodegree scholarship, which I did.

The courses provide an online community led by Udacity Mentors and even student alumni, as well as support from your fellow students.

Some of the criteria for receiving the Nanodegree was not only successful completion of all the course work, but ample participation in the online community. And this was a much bigger challenge for me than the coursework.

As an introvert, I pretty much like to keep to myself, and it can be a challenge for me to open up to people. However, the urgency of this requirement, as well as knowing the material well enough to provide value to others allowed me to get over that hurdle. When Udacity notified me that I received the full scholarship, I was elated!

The full Nanodegree program itself is a collection of courses offered by Udacity, and was more challenging (and longer) than the first three months. You really have to make a schedule and stick to it to stay on track. The community is always there to assist you should you need it. And of course, you can provide assistance to others yourself as well.

While I already have some experience developing Android apps, I’m using Adobe AIR, which can shield you from the inner workings of how Android really works. This course helped me to get deeper into those underlying layers. While I have a better understanding of the development process, there is still much to learn. This Nanodegree program doesn’t go over every detail (it would take forever, heh), it does help teach you how to figure out things on your own. you don’t need to have all the answers up front; but knowing how to research them to find out is crucial to your success as an Android developer (or any type of developer for that matter).

During the course, I was also working on a side project as an additional challenge, using what I’ve learned from this program. It’s a game, of course (of course!). I should have it released later this year, so stay tuned for that!

Thanks to Google and Udacity for this incredible opportunity! I’m so glad I was able to participate in this!

– C. out.