This is backwards and difficult to admit, but I would say my biggest contributor in staying in the game is learning. Earlier in my career I slacked off and didn’t touch code after work. I know it cost me opportunities with other jobs as I was clueless about newer technologies that were coming out. I would walk into a room and my architect would talk about some new feature of ASP.NET or SharePoint (yuck) that I didn’t know about. I would spend more time researching about that feature as well as wonder how he knew.

The difference between 5 years ago and today is that I had to rely on bloggers to publish articles on their sites. I eventually got smart and subscribed to their site through RSS and put in on my phone. Yes, I’ve been developing before the first iPhone was released. Now the new kids can go to their phones and Google will feed you articles relative to what you’ve searched while coding.

My how times have changed and now I can say with confidence I’m spending 2 – 3 hours a day learning something in our industry. Right now I’m creating a few apps that are in github that show my work. These aren’t fully deployed yet, but at one point I had automated deployments to AWS ECS. I learned the hard way that AWS is expensive ($88 for 6 small docker containers) for someone who wants to host a few demo apps with light traffic.

Not only am I spending more time working, but I’m also finding ways to make friends in the industry. The last couple of jobs I’ve landed have been through friends of mine. I consider myself lucky in that aspect as the previous generation before me did not have that luxury. The relationships I’ve created has lead me to working with SlingTV and HP. I will say those two companies alone would have rejected me if I would have came off the street. Fortunately for me, I made a friend and he’s been continually help me in getting these types of opportunities.

You don’t have to follow in my shoes, but this has what helped me get to where I am today. 10 years, 2 states later, a blog, work from home environment, people still beating down my door to come work for them. Lets just say I’ve done a few things right in these past years. Hopefully this will continue.