Investing is the most natural thing in the universe. Trees invest energy into seeds. Parents invest time, money, and sleepless nights into their children. Companies invest in employees. States invest in public school systems.
They invest because they expect growth of their investments.
The one who invests more and smarter has a huge structural advantage. This is true for species, states, corporations, …. and for Python coders!
So what is the best way to invest as a Python programmer?
There are fundamentally different ways you can invest as a Python coder. Here are the best way of giving something now to get more back later:
- Invest learning time now to save much more debugging time later. The more you learn the basics, the less time you’ll spend debugging and solving problems. Any minute you sharpen your skills now will come back to you many times over. As Abraham Lincoln eloquently said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax”. Learning Python is your way of sharpening the ax.
- Besides investing time, you can invest money in the right learning material. For example, say you want to create your own thriving coding business. You can spend hundreds of hours figuring out how to do this—and you’ll be smarter after you failed again and again. Or you can spend $300 for my Python coding business course that comes with countless interviews of successful coding business owners, practical projects, and step-by-step introductions of how to succeed. You’ll save hundreds of hours and your hourly rate will immediately double. The investment is a no-brainer.
- Invest in your network and your credibility. This one is huge—the ROI is much higher than anything else. Give everything you have and don’t worry about it. The world rewards people who are willing to give more than they receive. Becoming loved and respected in your community is one of the most important things you can do—especially in the Python community where people help and assist each other like in no other programming language.
- Invest in a good computer and internet connection. The value of time is much higher than the value of money. If you’ve time, you can get more money easily. If you’ve money, you cannot necessarily get more time. Just do the calculation yourself: by investing in a fast notebook and a fast internet connection, you’ll work 10% faster. It’ll costs you less than $2000 per year. Although earning $50,000 per year as a Python developer in the US can be seen as minimum wage, this investment would still return $5000 per year (against the $2000 invested). And the more you earn, the higher your ROI.
- Invest 8h in your daily sleep and recreation. By sleeping properly, you can easily be 20% more productive (and less prone to errors which is especially important for coders where every error can cost you tens of hours of debugging time—and much more if your users find the bug first). This is a no-brainer. You have to sleep anyways and there is no gain to be expected in reducing your sleep time. So sleep longer and optimize your sleep quality.
These are only a few examples of how you can benefit from this idea of investing in yourself as a Python programmer.
Related Video:
While working as a researcher in distributed systems, Dr. Christian Mayer found his love for teaching computer science students.
To help students reach higher levels of Python success, he founded the programming education website Finxter.com that has taught exponential skills to millions of coders worldwide. He’s the author of the best-selling programming books Python One-Liners (NoStarch 2020), The Art of Clean Code (NoStarch 2022), and The Book of Dash (NoStarch 2022). Chris also coauthored the Coffee Break Python series of self-published books. He’s a computer science enthusiast, freelancer, and owner of one of the top 10 largest Python blogs worldwide.
His passions are writing, reading, and coding. But his greatest passion is to serve aspiring coders through Finxter and help them to boost their skills. You can join his free email academy here.