After my last posting I received an email from someone asking how they can move up the ladder of development, so rather then a private reply I thought I would publish my reply here in a general format. So how do you move up the development ladder?

Of course I can only go by my own experiences, and so other then getting to know more about the features and powers of ColdFusion and looking at other technologies to keep your brain cells in shape I have also tried to read some of the best programming type books on the market, these aren't about programming per-see but more about how to think like a programmer and the ones off the top of my head are The Pragmatic Progammer (And the whol Pragmatic Programmer Series) and The Mythical Man Month both linked below:

On top of these books I recommend reading anything by Joel Spolsky, with his way of thinking you can certainly see you're not alone in what you do and he also has tips on how to change yourself for the better.

 Once you have to start managing people, I have found the following books of use again another Joel Spolsky book and one from Rands In Response

Now of course you can't learn everything from a book, but you can certainly get some seeds of information. But you need to complement these with someone to mentor you or a the very least to learn from. Now I understand this isn't something everyone can do in their work place, so you may need to go out to the community and ask some of the bloggers / developers you admire / respect and ask for their thoughts.

The Pragmatic Programmer series is a great helper to make you a better developer if not person in general. They can cerainly help your coding and thought process while you are desining your sites / applications.

 I think also soft skills such as UML, Subversion & ANT can help and the following books have certainly helped me. I use them for reference all the time.

 I don't expect any of my developers to remember everything all the time and in the office I ensure all my developers have access to the following books (In addition to the ColdFusion WACK books (Currently CF7 ones even though we are using CF8 |) ) :

And of course you need to read blogs of the community and I guess if your reading my rambles you already do so thats a check point.

I certainly think that I have been very lucky in my career, in being in the right place at the right time, to get the chance I have had. Where I've been involved in Desktop Support, Intranet Development, Having the chance to learn ColdFusion, Built, Install and Support Windows Servers. When you are in the deep end, you tend to learn quick especially in a broadcast environment with 8 million viewers ;)

You need to get as much exposure to all parts of Web Development from coding to deploying to production server support. I've also been lucky enough to have been using Enterprise edition of ColdFusion since it came out and I'd suggest to one and all to install the Enterprise edition in developer mode on your desktop and play with multi severs and clustering. It certainly opens your eyes to the power of the Java Platform let alone ColdFusion.

I also have a great love of the eXtreme Programming series and these can help too, but it is an acquired taste but it is certainly worth reading the main book:

These are the books and items that standout to me, there are a few others that I have read but I feel these are the ones that really made a difference to me. I hope this will help someone else move up the developer ladder and hey even leap frog me.

If anyone has any additional thoughts or even disagree with me then feel free to post a message (Moderated now but I never edit them or delete without good reason namely SPAM)

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How to move up the Development Ladder