Best practice to develop a career

Hi, my name is Yervand and I am a perpetual iOS Development enthusiast. Today I want to share with you my opinion on best practices for developing a career.

This is a real story from my life, a life that came from love at first sight iOS Development and I think my story can help you in your sphere as well.


This may come as a surprise, but I am a Guitar player and a teacher at a music school. I’ve been in Music for 11 years and many many years ago I would kill anyone who would say that I wouldn’t stay in music and can’t run after my dream to study at Berklee College of Music.

Besides music, I always liked mathematics and algorithms and that’s the reason I started to study Cybernetics at NPUA, but it was just a hobby.

I started to develop my career when I was expelled from university as my main focus was set on music. And without any idea how that works, I fell in love with iOS because I was playing guitar in GarageBand with iPad 1 and was shocked by the reality of sound.

Studying Apple development in my country is very expensive because you must use Apple devices. When I decided to become an iOS developer, my salary was 30$/month and for the cheapest Mac Mini, I should’ve worked 13 months.

What did I understand from this all?

Filter and explore your thoughts, wishes, problems.

After filtering I understood that in my case I had only problems and here is the FIFO table of problems:

Problem 1: Teacher of Psychology, whose pen expelled me

Problem 2: My Parents are very disappointed in me because of Problem 3.

Problem 3: I am expelled from the university

/Yep, my parents’ opinion is more important than the fact itself 🤨/

Problem 4: I want to study Apple Development but don’t have enough money

I call the next step “Sort & Prioritize”.

On this step we just need sort problems by priority. 
After the first phase of “Sort & Prioritize” step, the outcome is: 3, 4, 2, 1

Now after long discussions with the dean, he said that I can continue my course after six months. Ok, let’s do “Sort & Prioritize”-ing again.

The Problem queue after double-checking is 4, 3, 2, 1.

Oops FIFO becomes LIFO 🤭

To do something which is not possible at that moment or “Stairs level”

When I was thinking about how to become a programmer, I realized that programming is very similar to the Hogwarts stairs, which are always rotating and changing their direction.

For example this means that you can start with a cheaper and more primitive HTML, as the first step of the endless rotatable stairs, then as the time passes by you should change direction to a more interesting branch, and I built my road to the final goal like this:

HTML->CSS->BOOTSTRAP->JS->PHP->SQL

Ok. I guess now I’m a god of Web Development 😈, let’s try to find a job.

I found my job in web development and my first interviewer was like Albus Dumbledore, yep, a professor with a beard. I said that I want to do iOS Development and boom, it turned out that Dumbledore is a mobile team’s lead. The company gave me a MacMini for web development, and Dumbledore said that I must learn iOS by myself besides doing my current job as a web developer.

Ok. The Problem 4 is Solved.

NOTE: Dear Interviewers, always keep in mind that the interview can be just a small part of your job, but for candidates, it is very significant and can build or break one’s whole life. Be more attentive.

Then after six months, I restored my study. And I graduated with honors.

So the Problem 3 is Solved as well as the Problem 2.

Now I have a good job, I’ve graduated with honors, and I have a chance to learn iOS Development for free. I just can say Thank You to my psychology teacher.

The Problem 1 is Solved.

Grow up without stopping

After learning the basics, everyone should go inside deeper, through the lowest level for the understanding of the chosen way.

I realized that the best way for me to learn more in my field was through the interviews.

Why?

Interviewers have a strong sense of smell, they prepare many detailed bad questions and even don’t know the answers themselves. No need to worry about bad questions, because “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. After the interview, you just need to remember the questions and write them down in notes. After learning about every atomic detail of this question, try to answer, then read about that topic and answer again, again and again. And with every question use this flow of work. Go to Interview, try to get questions, hard questions, many questions, and get the answers to those.

After 2–3 years of experience in interviews try to do everything to become an interviewer, but keep in mind that in front of you, in the interviewee seat there is a candidate like you or even better than you.

Conclusion

There is no problem without a solution, it all depends on the time and well-set tasks for yourself, one must always remember that even the biggest problems have benefits. Don’t give up but go forward without staying in place even for a second.

Every step you take will help you with something.

Thank you for reading this
Yervand.

P.S. This article will help me to improve my English skills.