Just another career path

As a software engineer, I recently have heard of a lot of feedback from my colleagues and friends that they don’t see their career path or they don’t know how to move to the new levels in their company. No exception, I used to have that thinking before.

In my opinion, there is a very important reason why people are struggling to find the answer because “career path is not always the job titles”. Normally, each company has its own job titles such as junior-level developer, middle-level developer, senior-level developer, teach lead, software architect, CTO, etc. Hence, it is not true that a job title is reasonable for every company.

The interview is often conducted hardly to find a candidate matching the company title. If we have a good enough job title standard, the interview would take place very easily, right?

Therefore, I prefer to define my own career path through what skills are gained under a job title.

But wait, why do I need a career path?

To me, a career is an indispensable part of my life (and anyone else, sure?). My career path helps me visualize the big picture which motivates me to focus on the right track to achieve my next level. After all, a good career should bring me the fullest life having the following conditions:

It gives me a chance to indulge my passion
It gives me a chance that my contribution is appreciated
It gives me a chance to earn good enough money

Anyone should have their own career path, here is mine:

I see each level as a step of a ladder. It is very risky to skip any step. It doesn't mean that you delay getting to know what to be learned in the next steps. Don't let it be a black box and then get "surprise!". For example, to achieve my long-term goal as an intrapreneur/entrepreneur, I don't run a business now but I keep practicing as it a real business when building side projects with my friends.

Detail of level in my career path

No matter what the job title is, I categorize a level by the following criteria:

👷 Project/Product contribution
✋ Ability to lead and mentor the team
🕑 Years of working experience

	Who are they?	Get recognized (example)
Apprentice	Try to do things right	👷 Learn how to use tools ✋ Learn to collaborate well with other members 🕑 Usually 1 - 3 years
Journeyman	Keep doing the right things right	👷 Know how the used tools work ✋ Collaborate and cover/mentor some members well. 🕑 Usually 3 - 5 years
Master	Keep doing the right things better	👷 Know how to build a tool ✋ Lead and mentor some teams 🕑 Usually 5 - 10 years
Intrapreneur or Entrepreneur	Turn off the old and create new right things	👷 Innovate tools ✋ Lead and mentor the whole department/company 🕑 Usually 10 - xx years

Math fundamentals and Katex

It was really tough for me to understand many articles about data science due to the requirements of understanding mathematics (especially linear algebra). I’ve started to gain some basic knowledges about Math by reading a book first. The great tool Typora and stackedit with supporting Katex syntax simply helps me to display Math-related symbols. Let’s start! The fundamental ideas of mathematics: “doing math” with numbers and functions. Linear algebra: “doing math” with vectors and linear transformations. 1. Solving equations Solving equations means finding the value of the unknown in the equation. To find the solution, we must break the problem down into simpler steps. E.g: x 2 − 4 = 4 5 x 2 − 4 + 4 = 4 5 + 4 x 2 = 4 9 x = 4 9 ∣ x ∣ = 7 x = 7 or x = − 7 \begin{aligned} x^2 - 4 &= 45\\ x^2 - 4 + 4 &= 45 + 4\\ x^2 &= 49\\ \sqrt{x}&=\sqrt{49}\\ |x| &= 7\\ x=7 &\text{ or } x=-7 \end{aligned} x 2 − 4 x 2 − 4 + 4 x 2 x ∣ x ∣ x = 7 = 4 5 = 4 ...

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

Building Axon.ivy Projects on Bitbucket Pipelines

Read me if you don't know what Axon.ivy (Ivy) is. Motivation - Ivy projects are designed to be built on a continuous integration (CI) server like Jenkins - Today, Bitbucket supports for CI with Bitbucket Pipelines - We're using Bitbucket. Then, why not? It must be very cool and convenient for us if we can centralize our CI and VCS (version control system) tools in one place. Here is an approach We have to use a maven plugin called project-build-plugin to build ivy projects. This plugin requires an instance of Ivy engine during building time. Bitbucket Pipelines allows us to specify our own docker image as a build environment. What we need to do is to prepare our docker image with needed stuffs such as JDK, Maven, Ivy engine, etc. Step 1. Prepare Docker images For testing purpose, I already created two docker images: Maven and Axon.ivy engine. They are now available on Docker Hub This image for Maven using Oracle JDK 8 This image for Axon.iv...

Java Core - Top 10 Questions Every Developer Should Know

#RandomlyPickedByMe What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer? Why do I get "SomeType@a3fde" when I print my code? Why is String immutable? Why "equals" method when we have "==" operator? Is List<Dog> a subclass of List<Animal>? Why shouldn't we use raw type? Is Java “pass-by-reference” or “pass-by-value”? What's the advantage of a Java enum versus a class with public static final fields? Why "double x = 0.1 + 0.2" and result of print(x) is 0.30000000000000004? 1. What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Holy crap! (Vietnamese: Thế quái nào lại có câu hỏi ngớ ngẩn vậy chứ?) "Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet are similar." - Greg Hewgill (on StackOverflow) 2. Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer String is immutable. StringBuilder and StringBuffer are mutable. StringBuffer is thread-safe. String...

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