Do you feel stuck in your career? I've felt that way, too. Let me tell you a story about a secret that made my career explode.

It was 2002. I was at The American Chamber of Commerce in San Paolo, attending the Sun Tech Days developer conference. The venue was full and I was a little lost.

Maybe "lost" doesn't define my state very well. "Out of place" works much better. After all, I was just a tech newbie in the midst of giants.

I saw some well-known faces—Bruno Souza and Fabio Velloso. "Should I introduce myself?", I thought.

Of course not...who was I? I should leave the guys alone—they must always be busy at conferences such as this.

I read the program and saw that there was a keynote speech taking place in the main room. It looked like it was by someone important, called James Gosling. I had no idea who he was, but I went to room.

I was the first in line. Of course I was—I was a newbie! Everyone was deep in conversation while I was there alone standing in front of the door. What were they all talking about? Definitely having some super-technical discussion that I wouldn't be able to understand. Better to stay there and wait.

Five minutes before they opened the doors, there were 200 people lined up behind me. Hey, looks like I was a lucky newbie, huh?!

I walked in and took a seat in the second row, waiting for the keynote speech to start.

Holy God, James Gosling is the creator of Java! What a silly newbie I was.

His talk was awesome! You know, he is not the best speaker in the world, but there were some things that he mentioned in his speech that amazed everyone in the room. Maybe it was his passion, his knowledge, or even the super-cool project that he revealed he was working on—the operating system for a remote-controlled Mars rover. Wow!

It was already the end of the second day of the conference and I felt disturbed—there were so many things to do with this Java thing. I'd tried it out a little by myself, but seeing all those Sun evangelists talking about real-life and cool projects took me to a whole new world of possibilities. My career needed to go in that direction.

After a few days out of the office, I returned and couldn't help myself—I needed to tell everybody what I'd just seen. Most of us who worked there worked with Visual Basic and Delphi, but Java would bring a whole new set of possibilities to our projects.

Just 6 months after I attended the Sun Tech Days conference I was working on my first Java project. That's right—the company outsourced a project and asked me to work on it with our partner!

What a terrible idea! Our partner's lead developer knew about as much about Java as I did, but I thought "OK, let's do this." At least I would have the opportunity to work on a real Java project.

In 2004, I found myself about to talk at a big conference for the first time ever. I had to admit, I was terrified. But, actually, a new friend, Mauricio Leal, was joining me for the talk. He was one of the top Java influencers in Brazil and agreed to give a talk with me at the Just Java conference. Or, was it me that agreed to do the talk with him? Well, it doesn't matter now.

It was very hard for me to go to the conference as my mother had started her fight against cancer just a few months before. I was not only very concerned about her, but I also didn't have enough time to prepare for the conference. However, she encouraged me to go and said that she was proud of her child talking at a big event. Thanks, Mom!

We gave our talk and it was great! I had a lot to learn from Mauricio and all of his Java friends. I needed to keep going with this community thing—events, open source, talks, and so on.

In 2005, I decided to join a big project at the same company that I had been working with for the last 3 years. No, not a Java project, but a project so big that I couldn't miss the chance to be a part of it. It would be good for my career and I would get some good opportunities as a project manager.

By June 2006, my mother had just lost her fight against cancer. I was destroyed. I never thought, in my entire life, that I would lose her when she was only 58 and I was 26. Who cares about my career? Who cares about my job? Who cares about anything?

In December 2015, I was driving my car, with my wife at my side and my baby daughter in the back seat. I was telling my wife that I felt very concerned about my career.

I realized that I was no longer a kid. I was 36 and I had a good job that I was earning decent money from—but, I felt...stuck. Since when—2004? I know—it was a big mistake to join that project, even though it was a big one. We had all failed in it.

I told my wife "you know, I have to do something..."

After a couple of sleepless nights, some hours of research on the internet, and reading some reference books, I thought I had put a good list together for someone who had done nothing for years. Here it was:

• Write a technical article to be published.
• Give a tech talk at a small event.
• Get a Java EE Architect certificate.

I decided to stick with Java until the end. I knew a lot about it—I'd been studying and working with it for many years. I had to focus on it and I knew I could do it.

Suddenly, in the middle of all of this big confusion and a lot of doubt, I'd made it. I'd become a partner in the company!

"Well, maybe I've done something right, huh?!", I thought. All those years of hard work and study had finally paid off.

But, what was I thinking? I hated sales, I hated dealing with clients, I hated negotiations, I hated wearing a suit, and I hated chasing money. I hated this partner stuff!

To have my own business was always a dream of mine, but my life at that time felt more like a nightmare. This wrong decision made everything fall apart. The situation was unbearable, to the point where I now needed to take medication for depression.

All this poison in my mind made me think "what the hell am I doing with my life? That's not the path I want to follow." I mean, yes, the company was great and they were doing great things, but not in a way that worked for me.

I needed a change. I needed to make a move. If I didn't, what about my family’s future? What kind of support would I be able to give my wife and daughter when I got old and retired?

It's was another terrible day when I got an email from... Bruno Souza? The Brazilian Java-man? How the heck did this guy have my email address? Oh, yes, I had subscribed to some sort of mailing list.

In his email, he talked about dreams, saying that one of his friends was helping him with a career dream this year, so he had decided to help others, too. He said "tell me your career dreams for 2016 and I'll try to help you with them."

Well, I was sure this guy wouldn't even read my email, but I thought I would reply to it anyway. At least writing down my dreams for the year would help me visualize them. I used the list that I had showed to my wife a few weeks ago.

Just half an hour later, he had replied!

He said that he could help me in the following ways:

• With the article: He could help me find a good topic and publish it with the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Was he being serious? I was just thinking about writing a blog post or something!
• With the talk: Once I had written the article, he could help me turn it into a talk. OK, that sounded interesting.
• With the certification: He wouldn't help me with this at all. I should sit down and study. Yeah, that made sense.

From all of the conversations I had with Bruno, one thing always stood out—sharing. Share your knowledge, share what you know, and share to help others—share, share, share. It seemed like this guy really wanted to help people.

So, I managed to leave the company (and the partnership) and finally got a position that I wanted—systems architect!

That's it—I loved architecture and I loved to deal with all the different trade-offs when planning an application from scratch or scaling/refactoring some legacy applications. I had found my place!

Not so fast, pal, not so fast. Within a month or so, the company changed its CEO and the new guy decided that Java would die there and then. The focus now would be .NET. OK, let's try it out.

In the meantime, Bruno and I published our first article on the OTN and it got thousands of views in just a few days. That was awesome!

We created a proposal on the same subject to present at The Developer's Conference (the biggest developer event in Latin America) and JavaOne Latin America. We were accepted to both conferences and I had the opportunity to present with Bruno to hundreds of people at these events.

We later worked on submitting our proposal to JavaOne San Francisco. However, on the last day before submitting it, I decided to give up on it. I couldn't afford it. Bruno almost kicked my ass and said "Come on! Submit it! If it gets approved, you can figure out how to afford it."

The talk was approved and Cristina Saito, a former boss (and partner!) sent me a gift—airplane tickets to get to JavaOne. She said she was proud of me. I could probably never thank her enough for her kindness and generosity, and I hope this mention here goes some way toward that thanks.

It was hard to believe what had happened. Just 10 months after opening Bruno's email, 10 months after starting to take depression medication, and 10 months after the lowest moment of my career, I was in San Francisco, California. In a couple of minutes, I would be giving a talk with Bruno at JavaOne, the biggest Java event in the world. It was like a movie played through my mind and now I was here.

The talk was great! Some stuff went wrong, but we made it! It seemed as though this idea of sharing was working. I was feeling confident and couldn't wait to be back in Brazil and get back to work, getting things done and climbing my success mountain.

So, I landed in Brazil, went to the office, and... I was fired. Really? I thought that all this sharing stuff would help me, not cause me to lose my job... somebody lied to me!

OK, OK—let's take a deep breath...you know, I felt more confident now. No, I wasn't prepared for something such as getting fired after achieving the biggest accomplishment of my career up to now; but, I thought, I would figure something out.

It didn't take long until I got a position at Summa Technologies. Yes, sharing was working—I didn't even need to send in a resume. They had heard about me (because of my sharing) and there I was, working with the software that I had been talking and writing about.

The company was great, the team was highly skilled, and the project was challenging. But, you know, 6 months later it looked like I was getting stuck again. The results were just OK, the project was just OK, and there was nothing big to learn or to do here.

It was May 2017. In a few months, Java EE 8 would be released. What if we interviewed some top Java EE influencers from all over the world and shared all the information, expectations, and news they had about it? Sounds good. We thought we'd call this project Java EE 8—The Next Frontier.

Bruno was skilled enough to convince me to work with this Java EE 8 stuff and SouJava would give me all the support I needed. This was a SouJava initiative from the very first moment.

But, come on, why would all those Java EE experts give me an interview? Who was I?

It had been just 3 months since I'd started working with SouJava for the Java EE project. We'd already interviewed 15 of the top Java EE influencers. Thousands of developers from almost 70 countries saw the interviews. Our playlist on YouTube was featured on the official Java channel. All of the content got thousands of views a month.

I have to be honest—I would never have imagined that the Java EE community would be so open to this initiative. I mean, it's like they were expecting this content. They were willing to consume it.

The thing I was lacking this entire time? Focus! Anything you do without focus is almost useless. It can be helpful, but you won't have continuity.

These projects led me to write the book that you are reading right now. In one of my conversations with Packt, I asked them how they found me. They said: "Well, you've been sharing a lot of Java EE 8 content... that's what we need."

Just a few days after signing a deal with Packt, I got a call from Oracle. Yes, that Oracle!

So, right now, as I write these lines and am working at one of the biggest companies in the world, I'm doing exactly what I told you to do in this chapter—sharing my knowledge.

I tell you—if sharing my knowledge changed my career, it can also change yours. Don't think you don't have what it takes for it—you do! I can assure you that you know many things that other people would love to learn.

Why don't you find some good ways to help others? I can give you some suggestions on how you can help others based on what you just read here. Here they are:

• You can write a short block of code based on something you learned in this book. Share it on Twitter or on a blog post.
• Record a video explaining some of the insights you had when reading something in this book. Share it!
• If you don't want to put yourself out there at this point, email me telling me anything that this book has taught you. I'd love to read it! Send an email to [email protected].

Sharing is a habit. Exercise it!

To add more to this, we have a new version of Jakarta EE coming soon and you can refer to the next Appendix to know more about this new release!