Discovering the Lessons Firsthand

My name is Ka Wai Cheung. I’m a developer, designer, and founding partner at We Are Mammoth in Chicago.^[1] We build applications for a variety of clients and create some of our own web-based software. You’ll hear a bit more about those later.

This book is a collection of lessons, observations, and missteps I’ve gathered, firsthand, in our industry. For seasoned programmers, you might find some of my anecdotes similar to your own experiences. We can laugh, cheer, and cry through them together. For newbies beginning the journey, let this be a helping hand through your first few years in the industry.

In the last fifteen years, I’ve encountered myriad lessons. Here are just some of the topics we’ll address in this book:

• Why many traditional development processes and role definitions in this industry are antiquated—and how to sniff them out

• Why saying “no” to the software pet project and open-ended timelines is essential to productivity

• How collaborative work environments can make us so much more productive—and how they can also make us so much less

• How to make code generation a natural part of the development process and how it benefits us in ways besides faster code output

• How to best work with clients who don’t see eye-to-eye to us and how to handle angry customers who immediately dismiss new changes to our software

• Why big raises and the old mantra “Employees are our greatest asset” don’t equate to a better tech job

• How to recognize when software is becoming too complex for its own good

• How to become a better teacher so we can pay our knowledge forward to future generations of developers