Developer Career Masterplan

Heather VanCura is a Senior Director at Oracle in the Standards Strategy & Architecture team. She is the Director and Chairperson of the Java Community Process (JCP) program. In this role she leads the organization and chairs the JCP Executive Committee, composed of top global enterprises in the world. She serves as an international speaker, and an organizer of developer events around the world, engaging with open source groups and user groups. She regularly mentors developers at all career levels, leads coding workshops that extend into local communities to inspire young developers from diverse backgrounds, and delivers keynote presentations on these topics, including her signature series: How to Ally for Diversity & Women in Tech. Heather has worked with developers and technology executives for the past twenty years at Oracle, Sun Microsystems and at SCO Unix. She has served on the boards of Dress for Success and FIRST LEGO League NorCal, and regularly volunteers with organizations such as Andela, Rippleworks, Women Who Code, IEEE Women in Engineering, Anita Borg, and Professional BusinessWomen of California. Bruno Souza is a Java Developer and Open Source Evangelist. As founder and coordinator of SouJava (Sociedade de Usuários da Tecnologia Java; Java Technology Users Society) and leader of the Worldwide Java User Groups Community at Java.net, Bruno helped in the creation and organization of hundreds of JUGs worldwide. A Java Developer since the earliest days of the technology, Bruno took part in some of the largest Java projects in Brazil. Bruno is a Principal Consultant at Summa Technologies and has extensive experience in large projects in the Government, finance and service industries. A Cloud Expert at ToolsCloud, he promotes and develops cloud-based systems using Java. Nurturing developer communities is a personal passion, and Bruno worked actively with Java open source communities and projects. Bruno Souza is an Honorary Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), President of the innovation-focused Campus Party Institute, and Coordinator of Nuvem, the Cloud Computing Lab of LSI/USP. When not in front of a computer, Bruno enjoys time with his family in a little hideout near Sâo Paulo. An amateur in many things - photographer, puppeteer, father - he strives to excel in some of them.

Table of Contents

The secret to learn technology fast and continuously
Choose your best path for Learning, Training and Certifications
Optimize Your Support Network for Growth
Acquire the right Soft and Hard skills deliberately
Push yourself by improving outside of your comfort zone
Become a team player by embracing communities
Focus your growth by giving and receiving mentoring
Be part of a larger group: Meeting people at User Groups and Meetups
Grow your network using Social Media
Build deep, lasting relationships at Conferences and in person activities
Build trust with top developers and solve important problems by joining Open Source
Build trust at scale by sharing Publicly through Speaking and blogs
Be a leader, Manage up, down and across your organization
Step up your technology game: Define technology instead of merely using it
Build your Personal brand and be respected and requested as a trusted advisor