Antonio Leiva is a Madrid-based Android engineer who has led projects at several big companies in Spain. He is the author of the Leanpub book, Kotlin for Android Developers and 10 consejos para convertirte en un desarrollador experto. In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Antonio about his career, about his book, and about self-publishing on Leanpub. This interview was recorded on April 11, 2016.
Len: That’s a great line. I was wondering, your second Leanpub book is about, “Tips To Become an Expert Developer”, and I just wanted to ask you, what are your top three tips for a developer?
Antonio: Firstly, I wrote this book to give it as a present to people who joined the mailing list of my new blog, which I am writing in Spanish. I decided to sell it to everyone else who wanted it. That is why I published in Leanpub.
My three tips would be, first, specialization. We need to know a little bit about everything, but a lot about something. Because otherwise, we’ll have to compete by price with the rest of people. We have to choose whether we want to be chosen because we know a lot about something, or because we are the cheapest. So I think that specialization is one key point.
Another tip is personal branding. It’s helped me a lot during these years, like blogs, talks and events, now the book, and these kind of things.
My third tip would be, taking your profession as a passion. A developer who just works eight hours in their work and does nothing in their free time probably won’t succeed. You have to enjoy what you do so much, that you want to spend part of your free time on it.