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In our time starved lives it can be hard to find the time to study and practice programming every day. When you’ve got a day crammed full of chores, a long drive or you simply can’t face more time at the keyboard sit back, relax and get your daily does of coding from some of these amazing podcasts instead.

Are you committing these job application sins? If you're applying for lots of roles and not hearing anything back then make sure that you're not making any of these mistakes. Each of them is easy to make but fortunately easy to fix, take a few minutes to make sure that your job applications are giving you the best chance to land the job.

Working remote has traditionally been seen as a nice goal to attain at some point during a developer career. Once you are confident and trusted by your company then hopefully they allow you to work from home, or better yet, you join a fully remote team and live that true digital lifestyle.

Technology moves at a frighteningly fast pace and for developers it can feel like we have managed to grab on to a tigers tail and are now barely holding on whilst flying across the open plains of this technological continent we have made.

You will see this term a lot on job specs, to clarify it isn’t agile the adjective with a lowercase 'a', it is Agile the noun, the name of a specific way of working that is very common in software development.

Spotting a toxic work place is easy right? Crumby offices, beige walls, boring industry, PHP, No MacBooks. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. Some of the most interesting work you can do as a developer is at non-tech companies, in established industries on an older tech stack, perhaps in PHP on industrial estate somewhere. Why? Because those businesses have enough legacy and foundation to generate interesting problems.

The hiring process is broken, companies find it incredibly difficult to hire the technical talent they need to do the job. There simply aren’t enough skilled developers out there to work on the perfect magical systems that the collective genius of even a mid rate regional tech firm has made. In fact it’s so unlikely that you have the technical skills required to meet their high bar that you probably won’t get hired. So don’t apply.

The skills list required to be a full stack developer is long and it can be hard to know exactly what skills you need and to what level before you starting looking for a job. The often shared online resource for this kind of thing is [roadmap.sh](https://roadmap.sh) but, while I am sure the authors mean well, I actually think the amount covered here is too much to be helpful to new developers. So, I have my own list, it’s a bare minimum required skills list and it looks like this:

There are thousands of articles, videos and guides with tips on how to be a better developer. Ways you can make your code cleaner, how you can estimate work better or communicate well with non-technical colleagues. Rather than cover any of those I am going to give you the single best thing you can adopt to improve your career and your life.

Your first day as a junior developer is gong to be scary, not because _being_ a junior dev is scary but because the first day of any job is scary. Meeting new people, seeing a new code base, expectations that you can and will write code and deliver is on time, all of these combine to be quite stressful.