The Rational Software Engineer

This book will serve as a framework for you as a software engineer seeking a fulfilling career and wishing to stay passionate and maintain a healthy mental state. It is filled with protocols to achieve effective life-long learning, navigate career development, adapt to changes, maintain work-life balance, and have a healthy lifestyle.

As a successful software engineer you tend to focus on improving your technical skills: learning a new programming language, mastering another tool, or using a library. But you also need to build a solid mental framework that will help you navigate your professional development. You need to develop the skills that will help you be a happy software engineer.

This book will help you if you feel frustrated, unmotivated, or unhappy; lost in your career path; or uncertain if you want to be a software engineer. It can help you deal with burnout, high levels of stress, or depression; or if you struggle to be productive while working from home.

What You Will Learn

• Efficiently organize your work day
• Know when and how to seek a new project, company, or career
• Take care of your body and mind in a software engineering context
• Understand what contributes to job satisfaction and how to integrate it into your career
• Use non-coding activities for your and your company’s benefit
• Build healthy relationships with managers and colleagues

Table of Contents

Part I: Passion

References

Chapter 1: Job Satisfaction

Chapter 2: Work Time Organization

Chapter 3: There Is No Perfect Project

Chapter 4: Initiative

Chapter 5: Burnout

Chapter 6: What to Avoid in the Long Run

Chapter 7: Career Change

Chapter 8: How to Find a Dream Job

Part II: Mindset

Chapter 9: Lifelong Learning

Chapter 10: Collaboration

Chapter 11: Values

Chapter 12: Health

Chapter 13: Company Attitude

Chapter 14: Handling Failures

Part Ill: Learning

Chapter 15: What to Learn

Chapter 16: Learning Effectively

Chapter 17: Feedback

Chapter 18: Learning from Other People

Chapter 19: Sharing Your Knowledge

Chapter 20: Learning from Code

Chapter 21: Rotation

About the Author

Mykyta Chernenko, originally from Kharkiv, Ukraine, now resides in Oslo, Norway. Beginning with Backend with Python, Mykyta soon expanded his toolkit to include Fullstack development and diverse languages like Go, Kotlin, and Typescript. Beyond his main technical focus, Mykyta has experience in DevOps, Data Engineering and Product Management.

Throughout his professional journey, Mykyta has been a part of various intriguing projects through his experience in product, outsource, and consultancy companies. He contributed to the Azure integration of Nutanix’s cluster discovery project, and played a central technical role at Factmata, taking over the engineering and infrastructure. He further continued to product teams at both Mercell as a Tech Lead and as a Senior Software Engineer at Arundo Analytics.

Separate from his project contributions, Mykyta has shown a strong passion for teaching and sharing his experience. He has taken on mentoring roles throughout his career, guiding and supporting over 20 professionals in the field, and expressed himself through his blog, “The Rational Software Engineer” on Hackernoon.

Understanding that Software Engineering is driven by people and their thinking, Mykyta consistently tries to broaden his horizons in the psychology and neurobiology realm through books and courses.

Now Mykyta is a Co-Founder of Nemlys – a promising tech startup dedicated to helping couples improve their communication through personalized AI questions for their dates.