Personal Interests Influence Your Developer Career

There are way too many choices for future tech workers these days. You can’t just say you want to become a software developer; you also have to qualify it with web, mobile, desktop, etc. One reason? It has a lot to do with the programming language you study in college or your self-study. But it’s much more complicated than simply choosing one type of development job and sticking with it. If you want a career that will be long-lasting, you have to put some thought into it. One of the ways you can do that is through exploring your personal interests.

Ways Your Interests Affect Your Developer Career

Your personal interests communicate your capabilities to your future employers. I’m not talking about skills (that will come later); interests tend to inform what tech skills you develop along the way. For instance, let’s say one of your interests is shopping. Though it may not be a given that you bring to the table an ability to code an entire e-commerce algorithm, you have within you the natural ability to understand and become passionate about it.

When you focus on your interests, you further strengthen your skills and passions. What does this mean? That you can perform a lot better—and with more enthusiasm—in your future career than your peers who aren’t interested in those things.

Pursuing a career full of your interests makes you happier. You know the old adage: if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. That doesn’t mean your job needs to be involved with every single interest you have, but you’ll be much happier if it involves at least one or two of your general interests.

Diving into My Interests

Before I decide on what specific development role I’ll focus my career search on, I want to see which of my interests align with the top five roles I chose in my last blog post about the various developer jobs in the industry. Exploring these interests will help me analyze which development role is more suited to my life and what I want to do with it.

Non-Technical Interests

  • Writing
  • Creativity
  • Brainstorming
  • Researching
  • Starting new projects
  • Planning
  • Problem-solving

Insights

All of my non-technical interests point toward a development role that allows me to be involved in at least the beginning stages of a development project. Looking at all these interests listed together tells me that there is a development role missing from my list of top-five roles. So, I’m going to add product manager to my list, giving me a total of six development roles so far.

Technical Interests

  • Databases
  • Coding
  • Mac computers
  • iPhones
  • Learning new programming languages
  • Digital forensics

Insights

Based on these technical interests, I think it could be beneficial to add the following roles back to my list:

  • Desktop developer for Mac applications
  • iPhone mobile developer
  • Full-stack developer
  • Security developer

After adding these four to today’s final list, I have a total of ten development roles. (See the next section for that list.)

Today’s Final List of My Top Development Roles

  1. Back-end web developer
  2. CRM web developer
  3. Database developer
  4. Technical writer
  5. API developer
  6. Product manager
  7. Desktop (Mac) developer
  8. Mobile (iPhone) developer
  9. Full-stack developer
  10. Security developer

As the rest of this month carries on, I’ll work on adding more based on other criteria. I’ll also work on cutting the list down so I can make a final decision on what development role to pursue as my career. I have an idea of what I think my ultimate choice will be, but I want to make sure I make the right choice so I can have full confidence in my future.

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