- There's a lot of advice out there
that suggests that you should focus
on one particular topic in your career.
For example, you might want to focus on
being a web developer or a games developer.
But is it possible to focus and be an expert
in two or more areas of computing?
So let's talk about that in today's video.
(electronic music)
Welcome back, my name is Tim Buchalka
with another programming tip of the day,
and the question is again, whether it's possible
for you to be an expert and to work in two fields
or topics or areas of programming at the same time.
Now my general advice is when you're starting out
as a programmer, you're trying to learn the ropes,
so to speak, is to focus on an individual area,
get your skills up, and start working in that area,
and get some experience.
But once you've done that, there's no reason why
you can't move into other areas,
and in fact, it's relatively common
to do that in the industry.
So for example, if you've got your first programming job,
once you get that, you'll probably be a junior programmer
and you'll be doing a particular aspect,
a fairly junior level programming position
will involve something along the lines of basic things,
for example, you might be working on the front end
of an application, your focus might be
on getting the visual side of things working.
But as you get more experience,
you might find there's other opportunities,
you can get into the back end development
where you're more working on the functionality
of updating databases and those sorts of things.
But then as time goes on, you might find there's other
areas you can get into.
You might find that you're really resonating
with that type of work, and might decide to, you know,
perhaps do something completely different
and get into game programming.
Now to give you an example, when I first started programming
way back in the wild, wild west days,
I started out playing around with games.
So I started writing games because as a young lad,
that's what I liked doing, I liked playing computer games.
So I did that, but as I started moving forward
in my career, and once I'd become a professional programmer,
I did do some professional game development,
but I've switched over into a career in Java,
and specifically, on the back end programming
because what happened was a good opportunity
and I quite enjoyed that aspect, you know,
writing the code that actually updated databases,
as I mentioned before, is a common thing
for back end developers to do.
But over the years I've transitioned,
and I went back to game development,
and I actually had a game company that I created
probably about 10 years ago that released some games,
and I actually had a great time, I actually managed
a team of people to produce apps.
So for me, it's been a good journey moving around
into different industries,
but what would be fairly hard to do, I think,
is if you tried to do this full time,
so in other words, you'd decide that you're going to become
a full time game developer, but also, you want to still
keep your skills current as a back end developer,
because you know, at the end of the day,
there's only so many hours of the day available to you.
So in general, my answer is yes you can do it,
it is possible to specialise and be good
in more than one area of computing,
but because technology's changing so fast,
you might be good today, but if you're not keeping
those skills up, you're not working in that particular area,
you can find that your skills get quickly outdated.
I think in general, my advice is it's better
to specialise and focus on a particular area,
and then if you decide to get out of that area,
you then focus on another area
and try and specialise in that.
So the analogy I used was back end developer,
focusing on that, and if you decide
you've had enough of that, start looking somewhere else,
and perhaps start focusing on game development
and try and get into a full time job
and full time work on that, and get really good at it.
So that's my advice.
In general, stick to a particular area,
specialise in that, and then if you're not happy,
start looking around, but there's only so many hours
available in the day, so you really have to focus,
or in my opinion, focus on one thing
that you can do really well, and that'll help your career
and you really increase the amount of opportunities
available to you.
All righty, so I hope that helped.
If you've got any questions, feel free to leave a comment
and I'll get back to you.
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