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10-WAYS you can look after your Smartphone

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Your Smartphone is valuable… but are you doing anything to make sure you are protecting it as much as possible?

We have become a smartphone society. In both the UK and the US, around two-thirds of people own smartphones, and many of those people consider their phones an essential device for getting online.

Smartphones aren’t cheap, either. While the average price of an Android phone is around £200, the average price of an iPhone is around £570 and there are many phones that cost even more. Believe it or not, if you have the funds, you can pay thousands or even millions of pounds for a smartphone.

Most people take a deep breath when it’s time to replace their phone, because they know it’s going to hurt their wallet. But you can put off that painful experience by keeping your phone in good health. Here’s a checklist of ways to protect your smartphone. Let’s start with external threats.

 

1. Get a Case

There’s nothing worse than dropping your phone and shattering the screen. It happens a lot, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to get it fixed. The answer is to protect your phone with a case.

There are dozens to choose from for every model. If you know you often drop your phone, get a case that will protect your phone against anything (even driving a car over it!). It will make it heavier, but it’s worth it. Otherwise, a slimmer case or simple sleeve will do.

One tip: if you’re using a clip on case, make sure it’s got a decent-sized lip all around so if the phone does drop, it doesn’t land directly on the screen.

 

2. Protect Your Screen

Speaking of screens, consider a screen protector. Some screens are made of a tough material and may not need them. However, a protector may keep your screen together if you drop the phone. It also means it’s harder to scratch your screen, which can affect its responsiveness. Get a protector that’s easy to apply and is right for your phone.

 

3. Be Careful How You Put It Away

Unless you’re using a super-effective case or screen protector, ladies, avoid putting keys in the same section of your handbag as your phone. Gents – keys and phones don’t belong in the same pocket.

If you’ve ever had a scratch that is right in the middle of the area you need to swipe, you’ll know that key scratches (and other scratches) can seriously ruin the touchscreen experience.

While you’re at it, don’t put the phone in dangerous places, like on a balcony railing, for example. That’s just asking for the phone to fall and get smashed to pieces. When you put your phone down, keep it away from hazards so it will survive till you’re ready to upgrade.

 

4. Avoid Water and Extreme Temperatures

Most people don’t put their phones in water deliberately, but lots of people forget they have a phone in their pocket when heading to the beach or pool. One dip later, and the phone is toast (unless you manage to dry it out with rice).

 

5. Keep it Clean

You might not be able to see dust particles, but they get into your smartphone, even if you’re using a case or screen protector. Too much dust will result in your phone’s performance taking a hit. Use a soft screen-cleaning cloth with an appropriate screen cleaner to wipe your screen gently. Open the case every now and then to give the phone a wipe and get rid of the dust.

The five tips above help you provide external smartphone maintenance and protection, but safeguarding your phone is also about keeping it running smoothly. Here are some tips for doing that.

 

6. Streamline and Update Your Apps

Most smartphones include a bunch of apps that the manufacturer has installed. Chances are, you don’t need all of them. Since the more apps you run, the shorter your battery life, disable or uninstall any apps you don’t need.

For the apps you DO use, make sure you’re always running the latest version. App developers update apps regularly, to add new functionality, cut down on resource usage and guard against malware and security threats.

Tip: Either set your apps to update automatically, or update them manually at least once a week.

 

7. Clear the Cache

When you install apps or when they run, they may leave junk files behind in the cache. Those take up valuable memory which could be put to better uses. Clear these files out from time to time. Both Android and iOS allow you to do this.

 

8. Use Trusted Sources

Sometimes you want to download and install a new app, but where should you get it from? With the rise of malware on phones, the best advice is to use the app store for your device or another trusted app store, such as Amazon’s.

 

9. Expand Your Storage

If your phone allows it, install an external SD card to increase the available storage, then run any apps you can from this storage. You can also use it to store media files. This frees up the phone’s internal memory, resulting in better performance.

 

10. Look after the Battery

Follow the manufacturer’s guidelines for looking after your battery. Depending on the age of your phone and the battery it’s using, this might include:

  • charging your phone before it runs down completely
  • letting it run down fully once in awhile
  • restarting your phone from time to time
  • turning off services you don’t need (like mobile data when you can use Wi-Fi and live wallpaper)
  • keeping the battery cool (and turning off the phone to let it cool down if it overheats)

There’s plenty of advice online about the best practices for your particular smartphone model. Finally, you also need to ensure you can find your phone if someone steals it. Use the security features built into your device to help with this:

  • Lock your phone with a pin, password or pattern.
  • Don’t share your password.
  • Install a security app to help you track your phone if it gets into the wrong hands.

 

Even if you do apply all of these factors to taking care of your smartphone, things may still go wrong on them from time to time. If you are interested in Mobile Phone Repairs and Maintenance, check out our latest job vacancy by following this link!

– Sharon Hurley Hall

4 Must-Know Methods for protecting against Ransomware

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Ransomware is a multi-million-pound crime operation that strikes everyone from hospitals to police departments to online casinos.

It’s such a profitable scheme that experts say traditional cyberthieves are abandoning their old ways of making money—stealing credit card numbers and bank account credentials—in favor of ransomware.

Due to the consistent development in Ransomware, you’re still largely on your own when it comes to fighting ransomware attacks, which hackers use to encrypt your computer or critical files until you pay a ransom to unlock them. You could choose to cave and pay, as many victims do. Last year, for example, the FBI says victims who reported attacks to the Bureau enriched cyber extortionists’ coffers by $24 million. But even if you’ve backed up your data in a safe place and choose not to pay the ransom, this doesn’t mean an attack won’t cost you. Victims of the CryptoWall ransomware, for example, have suffered an estimated $325 million in damages since that strain of ransomware was discovered in January 2015, according to the Cyber Threat Alliance. The damages include the cost of disinfecting machines and restoring backup data—which can take days or weeks depending on the organisation.

But don’t fear—you aren’t totally at the mercy of hackers. If you’re at risk for a ransomware attack, there are simple steps you can take to protect yourself and your business. Here’s what you should do.

 

First of All, Who Are Ransomware’s Prime Targets?

Any company or organisation that depends on daily access to critical data—and can’t afford to lose access to it during the time it would take to respond to an attack—should be most worried about ransomware. That means banks, hospitals, Congress, police departments, and airlines and airports should all be on guard. But any large corporation or government agency is also at risk, including critical infrastructure, to a degree. Ransomware, for example, could affect the Windows systems that power and water plants use to monitor and configure operations, says Robert M. Lee, CEO at critical infrastructure security firm Dragos Security. The slightly relieving news is that ransomware, or at least the variants we know about to date, wouldn’t be able to infect the industrial control systems that actually run critical operations.

“Just because the Windows systems are gone, doesn’t mean the power just goes down,” he stated. “[But] it could lock out operators from viewing or controlling the process.” In some industries that are heavily regulated, such as the nuclear power industry, this is enough to send a plant into automated shutdown, as regulations require when workers lose sight of operations.

Individual users are also at risk of ransomware attacks against home computers, and some of the suggestions below will apply to you as well, if you’re in that category.

 

1. Create Data Backups

The best defense against ransomware is to outwit attackers by not being vulnerable to their threats in the first place. This means backing up important data daily, so that even if your computers and servers get locked, you won’t be forced to pay to see your data again.

“More than 5,000 customers have called us for help with ransomware attacks in the last 12 months,” says Chris Doggett, senior vice president at Carbonite, which provides cloud backup services for individuals and small businesses. One health care customer lost access to 14 years of files, he says, and a community organisation lost access to 170,000 files in an attack, but both had backed up their data to the cloud so they didn’t have to pay a ransom.

Some ransomware attackers search out backup systems to encrypt and lock, too, by first gaining entry to desktop systems and then manually working their way through a network to get to servers. So if you don’t back up to the cloud and instead backup to a local storage device or server, these should be offline and not directly connected to desktop systems where the ransomware or attacker can reach them.

“A lot of people store their documents in network shares,” says Anup Ghosh, CEO of security firm Invincea. “But network shares are as at risk as your desktop system in a ransomware infection. If the backups are done offline, and the backup is not reachable from the machine that is infected, then you’re fine.”

The same is true if you do your own machine backups with an external hard drive. Those drives should only be connected to a machine when doing backups, then disconnected. “If your backup drive is connected to the device at the time the ransomware runs, then it would also get encrypted,” he notes.

Backups won’t necessarily make a ransomware attack painless, however, since it can take a week or more to restore data, during which business operations may be impaired or halted.

“We’ve seen hospitals elect to pay the ransom because lives are on the line and presumably the downtime that was associated, even if they had the ability to recover, was not considered acceptable,” says Doggett.

 

2. Just Say No—To Suspicious Emails and Links

The primary method of infecting victims with ransomware involves every hacker’s favorite bait—the “spray-‘n’-pray”phishing attack, which involves spamming you with emails that carry a malicious attachment or instruct you to click on a URL where malware surreptitiously crawls into your machine. The recent ransomware attacks targeting Congressional members prompted the House IT staff to temporarily block access to Yahoo email accounts, which apparently were the accounts the attackers were phishing.

But ransomware hackers have also adopted another highly successful method—malvertising—which involves compromising an advertiser’s network by embedding malware in ads that get delivered through web sites you know and trust, such as the malvertising attacks that recently struck the BBC. Ad blockers are one way to block malicious ads, patching known browser security holes will also thwart some malvertising.

When it comes to phishing attacks, experts are divided about the effectiveness of user training to educate workers on how to spot such attacks and right-click on email attachments to scan them for malware before opening. But with good training, “you can actually truly get a dramatic decrease in click-happy employees,” says Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4, which does security awareness training for companies. “You send them frequent simulated phishing attacks, and it starts to become a game. You make it part of your culture and if you, once a month, send a simulated attack, that will get people on their toes.” He says with awareness training he’s seen the number of workers clicking on phishing attacks drop from 15.9 percent to just 1.2 percentin some companies.

Doggett agrees that user training has a role to play in stopping ransomware.

“I see far too many people who don’t know the security 101 basics or simply don’t choose to follow them,” says Doggett. “So the IT department or security folks have a very significant role to play [to educate users].”

 

3. Patch and Block

But users should never be considered the stop-gap for infections, Ghosh says. “Users will open attachments, they will visit sites that are infected, and when that happens, you just need to make sure that your security technology protects you,” he says.

His stance isn’t surprising, since his company sells an end-point security product designed to protect desktop systems from infection. The product, called X, uses deep learning to detect ransomware and other malware, and Ghosh says a recent test of his product blocked 100 percent of attacks from 64 malicious web sites.

But no security product is infallible—otherwise individuals and businesses wouldn’t be getting hit with so much ransomware and other malware these days. That’s why companies should take other standard security measures to protect themselves, such as patching software security holes to prevent malicious software from exploiting them to infect systems.

“In web attacks, they’re exploiting vulnerabilities in your third-party plug-ins—Java and Flash—so obviously keeping those up to date is helpful,” Ghosh says.

Whitelisting software applications running on machines is another way Sjouwerman says you can resist attacks, since the lists won’t let your computer install anything that’s not already approved. Administrators first scan a machine to note the legitimate applications running on it, then configure it to prevent any other executable files from running or installing.

Other methods network administrators can use include limiting systems’ permissions to prevent malware from installing on systems without an administrator’s password. Administrators can also segment access to critical data using redundant servers. Rather than letting thousands of employees access files on a single server, they can break employees into smaller groups, so that if one server gets locked by ransomware, it won’t affect everyone. This tactic also forces attackers to locate and lock down more servers to make their assault effective.

 

4. Got an Infection? Disconnect.

When MedStar Health got hit with ransomware earlier this year, administrators immediately shut down most of the organisation’s network operations to prevent the infection from spreading. Sjouwerman, whose firm distributes a 20-page “hostage manual” on how to prevent and respond to ransomware, says that not only should administrators disconnect infected systems from the corporate network, they should also disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on machines to prevent the malware from spreading to other machines via those methods.

After that, victims should determine what strain of ransomware infected them. If it’s a known variant, anti-virus companies like Kaspersky Lab may have decryptors to help unlock files or bypass the lock without paying a ransom, depending on the quality of encryption method the attackers used.

But if you haven’t backed up your data and can’t find a method to get around the encryption, your only option to get access to your data is to pay the ransom. Although the FBI recommends not paying, Ghosh says he understands the impulse.

“In traditional hacks, there is no pain for the user, and people move on,” he says. But ransomware can immediately bring business operations to a halt. And in the case of individual victims who can’t access family photos and other personal files when home systems get hit, “the pain involved with that is so off the charts…. As security people, it’s easy to say no. Why would you feed the engine that’s going to drive more ransomware attacks? But … it’s kind of hard to tell someone don’t pay the money, because you’re not in their shoes.”

 

For more news on Information Technology, visit our ‘latest industry news’ page by following this link!

If you are looking for a new career within the IT Industry, check out our latest jobs by visiting our Jobs Page!

 

– Kim Zetter

4-Tips from Richard Branson on Business Growth Strategies

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Starting your own business can be one of the best decisions you make in life, but it can also lead to some tough situations, and hard decisions to make. Fortunately, Richard Branson has shared some of best advice for growing a business…

“It is no easy task but with the right support and a smart approach, the dream of scaling up your venture from start-up to successful business is in reach,” the Virgin Founder says in a recent SME Advice blog. “If you want to be in business 10 years down the line, you must have a deep understanding of your business, the market it operates in and a great team to support.”

 

Plan for the long-term

Failing to plan for the long-term and thinking about the possible risks and opportunities could make all the difference to the success of your business. “Setting some milestones for you and your team to work towards will keep you motivated and driven,” Branson recommends.

“There will be obstacles to growth you cannot foresee but having a roadmap in place from the get-go will help build structure and focus to decision-making.”

He also suggests putting in place strategies to mitigate any obvious risks to your business model from the start. “If you have a clear vision of where you would like your business to have expanded to after 10 years, plan how you can achieve this.”

 

Stick to your founding principles

Branson has one key piece of advice for when expanding into new territories or creating new products: “Having a uniting them all under one roof is one of the best advantages a business can have. Customers relate to brands and the values it stands for more than the tangible aspects of a product.”

He advises working out your business’ values and principles early on so that you can turn these values into tangible activities your customers can interact with. “Virgin has always been about putting the customer at the heart of everything we do and innovating in industries ripe for disruption. This is what our brand stands for and is applied to every business bearing our brand name.”

 

Gather a great team

Investing in the people you’re working with and trusting them with responsibility is another key ingredient to building a successful business, Branson says. “I learnt this from a very young age. There is little point recruiting great people if you don’t then give them the autonomy to take their role and run with it.

“It also frees you up as the founder to focus less on the day-to-day activities and more on the over-arching objectives laid out in your 10 year roadmap. Over my 40 years in business I have assembled a fantastic team to run the Virgin Group’s day-to-day activities and this has freed me up to spend 80 per cent of my time working with Virgin Unite – the not-for-profit arm of the Virgin Group.”

 

Get the right support

Having a good mentor can help you learn from others’ mistakes and hopefully avoid them, as well as teaching you how best to use the funds you have available, Branson says. “I myself benefited hugely from the words of Sir Freddie Laker when starting Virgin Atlantic. He told me I could never compete with the big advertising budgets of the large airlines and would have to get out there and use myself to promote Virgin Atlantic.”

If you found this article interesting, be sure to check out our latest Business Development Executive job role by following this link!

Ever wondered what the most commonly asked Job Interview questions are? You can find out by clicking here!

– Natalie Clarkson

15 Steps on how to get into Software Development

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Considering a career in Software Development? Read these 15 Steps which could help send you on your way to an exciting new career!

More people than ever before are entering Software Development from non-traditional backgrounds. The number of coding bootcamps is increasing, and there’s a broad push from the industry to attract more diverse developers. Many companies are no longer solely focused on hiring senior developers, and have realised that it may be smarter to train and upskill the next generation of senior developers instead.

Software Development pays well, the industry is booming, and compared to many other careers, software developers get treated very well. But the thing that draws most career-changers to software development, is the search for more rewarding work.

The career transition stage can be a big, scary, but exciting place to be. It can be one of the most challenging life-changes a person could make however, the finishing result could be a more fulfilling career.

If you’re considering a career change, there’s one question that you should ask yourself, above all others: if you make the switch to software development, will you like it? Getting to a level of skill where you are hireable is a lot of work, and you may be leaving behind a promising career in the process. The stakes are high.

If you don’t know whether you’re going to like it, build things with code. Create a Tic Tac Toe game. Start a small online business and do the development yourself. Contribute to open source. Make games. Complete programming challenges. Build a personal website and do all the design and development yourself. If you enjoy any of these things, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy working as a software developer.

Switching careers can be an epic, challenging journey – but it could just be one of the best things you’ve ever done.

There are a thousand ways to learn to program; the route you take will depend on how you learn best. You can take online courses, find a teacher or mentor, watch YouTube videos, read books, get a Computer Science degree, watch screencasts, or simply jump onto the command line and start experimenting, hitting up Stack Overflow as you go.

 

Here are 15 tips which could help you start your journey to becoming a Software Developer!

1. Have something you (passionately) want to make: Whether it’s a blog, a game, a website, a SaaS startup, an online dating website, or an app to manage your family’s finances, having a project that you’re motivated to build, will push you through the tough times when learning to program. A real-world use-case for your skills will accelerate your learning.

 

2. Attend a coding Bootcamp to get a taster and see if you feel it will work for you: A good coding bootcamp will give you a focused environment, help when you need it, and support when the journey gets tough. When you’re first learning to code, it can be really hard to know what you should focus on.

A good coding bootcamp will also assume no prior programming knowledge, and teach you the skills you need from the ground up, unlike many programming articles and videos, which will be written with professional programmers in mind.

 

3. Connect with other people learning to program: Learning to code can be difficult at times. Having a network of other people going through the same challenges can be hugely important. If you don’t know anyone making the transition, attend local meetups and talk to people there, especially if you’re focused on languages popular among junior developers (Ruby and JavaScript in particular). If you’re lucky, your local programming meetup may even host a ‘Newbies’ night now and again. Make sure to go!

 

4. Find a mentor who works in the industry: A friendship or mentorship with a working software developer can also be immensely helpful in your journey. They will know what the interview culture is in your local industry, will be able to give you advice when you get stuck, help you focus on the most important skills to learn, and give feedback on your code. If you’re lucky enough to find a software developer generous with their time in this way, make sure to give back somehow, even if it’s just buying lunch when you meet. Once again, meetups are a great way to meet potential mentors.

 

5. Focus your learning:If you’re hoping to do backend programming primarily (the engine of most apps, not the visual presentation), focus on learning one language and one web framework as well as you can. Also aim to be somewhat familiar with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, as many roles will have you working with both the frontend and backend of an application. If you’re aiming for a front-end role, focus on JavaScript, HTML and CSS. You might also focus on a popular JavaScript MVC framework like React or AngularJS.

 

6. Be prepared to invest in your career change:You can spend a lot on the transition; books, courses, classes, and screencast subscriptions can add up to hundreds of pounds a month, and many boot camps are over £6,000. Despite the hype around programmer salaries, you can expect to make between £20k and £30k as a junior developer. At first, it might seem like you’ve invested a lot in this career change without much financial reward. Over the long term though, this investment should pay off as you rise to a senior developer level with the potential to earn between £50K and £70K.

 

7. Don’t worry if your journey isn’t linear:Learning to program is tough; it takes time. If you’re juggling a pre-existing career and other commitments, it may be difficult to focus on it for more than a few hours a week. You may have doubts, you may get distracted, and you may stop progressing for days, weeks, or months. Trust that if software development is truly what you want to do you’ll find your way eventually, even if you end up taking the scenic route.

 

8. Create an account on GitHub, build your profile, be selective about what you show: GitHub is an online hosting service for git repositories, best described as version-controlled programming projects. When a repository is public on GitHub, anyone can read through your code. Many hiring managers will check the GitHub profile of applicants, to get an idea of how they write code when nobody is watching. When evaluating junior applicants, the hiring managers may not be looking for amazing code, but instead looking for enthusiasm, work done on multiple projects, willingness to try out new things, and a sense of play. Your GitHub profile is a great way to show this, but keep in mind that hiring managers may only have a few spare minutes to review your profile. For this reason, it’s a good idea to make only substantial or interesting projects public. For projects which you were just using to learn, it might be worth making them private to give your best stuff the limelight.

 

9. It’s hard sometimes:Self-doubt is a common trap for junior developers, especially those from groups who are underrepresented in the software industry. If something feels hard, it’s not necessarily because you’re not cut out for this. It might be because you have more to learn, or perhaps, because the thing you’re working on is actually hard. You may also be concerned when something you find challenging seems easy to someone else, especially when that someone else has a similar level of experience. But stick with that person long enough and you’ll likely encounter something they struggle with, that you find really easy. We’re all different, we bring different pre-existing skills to the table, and we all practice differently. Programming is like any skill: you can become good at it if you persist long enough and care about getting better. Avi Flombaum, co-founder of the Flatiron School, says “I absolutely believe that anybody can learn how to program in the same way that we know anyone can learn how to read and write.”

 

10. Be aware of your blind spots:By all accounts, career-changers have been making waves in the development community. They’re self-starters who’ve sacrificed an existing career, and sometimes a higher salary, in order to become software developers. However, we do have blind spots. The inner-workings of computers and the internet are mind-bendingly complex, especially to anyone from a non-technical background. Mastering one programming language, one web framework, JavaScript, HTML and CSS might take up all your available time. However, when you’re starting out as a junior developer, you probably won’t realize that these things are just a small slice of the technologies you work with every day.

Think about the answers to some of the following questions:
How does your code get run?
How does your language’s interpreter or compiler know when it encounters a syntax error?
How does typing a URL into your browser toolbar result in a web page being rendered on your screen?
How does a web server work?
How do you stay logged into websites even after you close and reopen your browser?
How does your app run on a web server?
Your project is hosted on Heroku or AWS, but what do they use under the hood?
When people say an object is ‘in memory’, what does that mean?
How do you SSH onto a server?
How do you set up and use a build pipeline?
How does your operating system run on your computer?

Of course, this list could be much longer. There’s so much to learn that it can feel overwhelming. The good news is that you don’t need to know the answers to all these questions in order to be hired as a junior software developer, but you should try to learn them as you go further in your career. You can’t get really good at software development unless you have a working understanding of the tools that you work with every day. Increasing your understanding will empower you to make better choices, become better at debugging, and make better design decisions.

 

11. When you’re struggling, take time to appreciate the unique skills you have that computer science graduates may not have yet:If you’ve attended or scheduled a work meeting, been given tricky feedback at work, been through a performance review, or led a team, you already have valuable skills that recent computer science graduates may not have. You may be more at ease talking with stakeholders, better at meetings, planning and organization, simply through having more experience. Most importantly, you may have better perspective. After all, if you’ve previously worked as a nurse in an operating theatre, a bug in production might not seem so overwhelming. After all, nobody is going to get (physically) hurt!

 

12. Get experience with pairing:Pairing is the practice of having two developers share one computer and work on the code together. One developer will write code, while the other watches and does some of the following things: makes suggestions, asks questions, catches errors, and thinks more broadly about how the code being written, fits into the larger program. Since both roles are fatiguing, they will usually swap anywhere from 15 minutes to every few hours.

Pairing is a common practice in the industry and even more common in the coding interview process. You don’t need to be an expert, but pairing for the first time can be a little intimidating, especially when pairing with a senior developer. Despite this, pairing can actually be really fun, and is a fantastic way to learn. If you can, get some practice with pairing before you begin doing coding interviews. If you have a mentor, pair with them. Otherwise, you can find opportunities to pair at hackathons and hack nights in your local area.

 

13. Set up a mock programming interview:Programming interviews are likely to be quite different to the interviews you took to get a job in your current career. They often involve coding challenges, writing pseudocode on a whiteboard, pair programming, and feedback on your code. Learn as much as possible about coding interviews by researching them online. Then practice them with a friend. Find a whiteboard and solve simple problems by writing your code on it. Get your friend to ask you common programming interview questions. It doesn’t matter if your friend is non-technical. The experience will really help when it is time for your real coding interview, as they can be a little intimidating at first!

 

14. Before test-driven development, practice error-driven development:Errors will be your constant companion when learning to code. You’ll be breaking stuff all the time, and will be face a lot of error messages. As once non-technical people, error messages can be scary. Before learning to code, they may have meant that you wrecked your computer while installing a game, or bricked a phone while trying to unlock it. An important mindset when programming, however, is to see error messages as helpful.

When many developers encounter an error message, they react a little like they’ve been slapped on the hand, quickly navigating away from the browser or shell window and peering at the code they  just wrote, trying to figure out what might have made the computer so angry. In most cases, the computer is already telling us, via the error message it just printed, but we need to slow down and read it before we can reap the benefits.

Jeff Cohen, an instructor at my coding bootcamp, encouraged us to practise error-driven development. This method goes beyond slowing down to read error messages, and instead, lets a succession of errors guide you forward in your development. Call a method that doesn’t exist, see a ‘no method’ error, and then write the code to bring that method into existence. Reference a view that doesn’t exist, see a ‘no view’ error, and then create the view. Errors are not to be feared, in fact, they can guide you and help you build your skill as a software developer. Just try to avoid errors in the final product!

 

15. Learn about and practice test-driven development (at least a little bit): Once you’re comfortable with error-driven development, test-driven development is the next step in your learning. Test-driven development is a sought after skill in the industry, and familiarity with it is a requirement to get hired at some software companies. It’s the practice of writing code to ‘test’ how your program behaves, and to drive out a better design for your program. If you’ve ever added some functionality to a program, only to have it break something else that was previously working, this is one of the things that test-driven development (often abbreviated as TDD) can help with!

Few programming resources for beginners focus on TDD, mainly because it can be a difficult concept to teach. When you aren’t sure how to write good tests, it can feel more difficult than writing code. You may encounter a situation where you know exactly how to write the code that will solve a problem, but designing a test around it takes an hour because you’re not sure of the appropriate way to exercise the code with a test. Learning TDD will slow you down at first, but you’ll be repaid with confidence – confidence that your programs work, and confidence that if you break something, you’ll know immediately. Tests are an incredibly useful safety net for junior developers.

You don’t need to be an expert at testing, but some familiarity with TDD will put you ahead of many other junior applicants, especially those coming from traditional Computer Science backgrounds where test-driven development is still not always taught. Bonus points if you can eventually articulate the difference between a mock and a stub.

We hope you have found these tips useful and will have hopefully broadened your knowledge on ways of becoming a software developer. Apply yourself! You don’t need to be a genius to get into software development. Just make sure you remain consistent with your practice and studies. Remember that you will hit barriers and most importantly remember to push through them and never give up. As previously mentioned, becoming a software developer is a challenging career path, but the resulting future prospects can be outstanding. You could find choosing to become a software developer might end up being one of the best decisions of your life. Good Luck!

If you considering a career in Software Development and would like to know more, be sure to get in contact with us here!

If you already have experience in Software Development and you are seeking new opportunities, make sure you check out our latest job role by clicking here!

-Natasha Postolovski

Considering an IT Career?

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Whether you are looking for your first job or are in need a career change, many people are opting to start an IT Career.

There are so many different IT Career routes you can explore, from software design right through to game testing. It helps that IT jobs are also currently high in demand, especially IT contractors and freelancers.

Careers in IT deal with the design, creation, management and maintenance of the varied components of the system, including software, hardware, networks, systems integration and multimedia. Broadly, information technology can be divided into four central pathways: network systems, information support and services, programming and software development, and Web and digital communication. Down each career avenue exist a huge amount of occupational opportunities, ranging from database administrator to computer systems engineer, digital media specialist to systems analyst.

Here is a list of starting pointers if you are new to the IT Industry and wondering how you can get onto the IT Career ladder.

  1. List the IT work you would be interested in.It is important to find a career you are passionate about. There are a large number of IT jobs available, so you should narrow down your choice in order to give yourself a specific focus.
  2. Network and apprenticeships.Get to know IT professionals in your area and learn how they have managed to establish themselves in the industry. You can also set up apprenticeships in order to gain valuable advice and guidance during your career move.
  3. Gain IT qualifications.Have a look in your local area for any educational opportunities that could give you an opportunity to achieve essential skills for your future career. Any professional certifications will highlight your knowledge and capabilities to future employers.
  4. Experience and internships.Of course, if you don’t want to go into education, you can gain your experience and skills from entry level positions or internships. A portfolio or CV demonstrating previous employment in the industry will also show your competence in the field, similar to IT qualifications.
  5. Constructing your CV.Your CV is often your first chance to show organisations your capability. Therefore, you should clearly pinpoint your relevant experience, skills and experience, and also highlight your enthusiasm for your chosen profession.

 

Sources:

– ComputerScienceOnline

– Parasol

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