Instinct is good, having passion to becoming a software developer like Dan Anton is great.

However, there are common traits among good software developers, especially the behaviors they exhibited towards achieving a great feet in their career as software developer.

Firstly, how do you become a software developer ?

There are several ways you can learn programming and start writing codes.

You can learn it in college, from a private tutor and even online, from different programming learning websites and forums.

I’ve actually seen all of these possibilities in my years of experience and I must say that, becoming a software developer has not much to do with schools grade and the intelligence we celebrate in the four walls of the school.

In fact, I find it difficult to learn programming myself in school when I was in the college; FORTRAN, java and others were like impossibilities.

Therefore, in my opinion, there’s no positive correlation between education and practical skills and knowledge.

Daniel Anton for example, left the US army to become a digital marketer and he has made fortunes from this.

He developed a program with search engine optimization (SEO) intent, BacklinksIndexer, which help bloggers and website owners to index their pages in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

He transformed an idea into reality and service, and that involves much creativity.

Backlinkindexer don’t only help indexing links but also work in building links to your pages from websites in order to improve site’s metrics and ranking.

Dan also developed rankscrew tool, an SEO software and website that has got many people in the SEO community talking and recommending his service.

Persistence

For you to sharpen your skills in app coding, persistence is a key and not only in software development, but generally in becoming better in any thing we do.

Great programmers always like to personalize a room for coding, where they work with their computer with rapt attention and hacking codes line by line.

To learn better, you need to continue practicing and the best way to do that is to practice what you’ve learned in theory.

It’s good reading about software development but you can’t do anything if you’re waiting to learn everything before starting writing codes yourself.

Dan didn’t get to the top of the ‘game’ suddenly, take crowdsource for example, he took him some time to perfect the program that can track keyword performance on search engines.

Another great addition is the inclusion of components that help in pulling viral posts for you to model and get better engagement.

Motivate yourself

The best way to motivate yourself as a software developer is to get yourself busy with programming related tasks.

There are assignments and coding challenges online, get yourself one, get a cup of coffee or distilled water and make yourself comfortable.

Confidence is also important here, remember, of you believe you can do it, you can and if you believe otherwise, you’ll definitely fail to do it.

Interact with better Software developers !

I believe in choosing a role model in software development but you need people you can talk to of you’re having one challenge or the other.

Most top software developers work for big companies or rather have their personal business and they’re always busy.

They may not be able to read your mails and you’d hardly find them on forums or other networks.

Be a problem seeker !

Even as a beginner, there are some problems you should always eager to to find solutions to them.

Whenever you sit in from of your PC, try to find solutions to problems on the Internet, test what you’ve just learned, find bugs and try to fix them.

You should also write documentation, use a variety of tools that are designed to help anything, read Requirements, write mails, maintain your bug-tracking system.

Don’t set workdays!
There is actually no typical workday, especially of you’ve not ‘arrived’. It is true that a typical software developer has some days he comes to office, goes out eating and relax; however, not in this order.

What would you now be doing when you don’t have schedule for work? That’s more reason for you to work tirelessly while you’re still young in developing software as an amateur and pro.

Be interested in many if not all

Software engineering is a broad field and from learning programming language to learning to develop software, you will find it so broad that you’d have to restrict yourself to a particular platform or environment.

To get the best in this profession, just like other developers who are more interested in the overall architecture of a software, how the individual technical components are built together and how they interpret instructions.

Others working on so-called APIs (application programming interface), so on the interfaces that are provided by other software developers, to develop other software on it.

Expand along the way!

There are low-level coding and development of Web applications, there are softwares that run only on specially built devices.

Also, there are apps for your Smartphone and programs that you must install on the computer as a desktop application.

There are large applications with many features, smaller tools, plugins and Add-Ons, games and apps.

There is a ton of software that you need to be able to develop software.

Even with that been said, you can start working on an environment and once you start doing well, broaden your way and expand your ‘coast’.

Let Diversity work for you

This diversity is the great thing about software engineering, as a profession, I’m bound to no industry, and also not a specific architecture/environment.

However, there are platforms I don’t dare to work professionally, this applies to any developer, yet, there’s always common denominator in software development as a profession.