5 Mistakes That Keep Java EE Developers Away from Great Projects

Who doesn’t want to work on a great project? I do! And I am almost sure that you too.

Of course: “great projects” may sounds different to different people. But we can try to agree that a great project should have at least two or three of these features;

• Nice technology
• Right tools for right job
• Interesting business
• Great team
• Friendly environment
• Good money

The more of those items, the harder will be to get a position in this project. So you should be prepared to be this lucky one!

If you are not in a great project today and have been trying hard to find one without any success for a long time, maybe you are falling in one of these mistakes.

Don’t keep up to date

I see many developers (and worst: recruiters) using “J2EE” to refer to Java EE. If you are one of them, I have a terrible news to you: you are 11 years late.

This is just an example on how you should at least update your technical vocabulary.

Want a practical way to get rid of it? Reserve 15 minutes a day to look around and see what is going on with Java EE. Follow the top experts on Twitter (see my blog post about it here). Sign up for good newsletters.

Doing this you will probably find something you need to learn. Then try to invest at least 5 hours a week to work on it.

Maybe seems like hard or difficult, but I believe it would be worst to stay behind the concurrence.

Don’t know the API’s (at least the most important ones)

So you present yourself as a Java EE developer and then someone ask: “Cool! What’s your favorite API?”… and you don’t know what to say?

(Or worst: you say you love J2EE…)

Seriously: you need to have at least an overview of the whole Java EE umbrella, a good knowledge of the most important ones and master those ones you really need.

Free tip: been talking with top Java EE experts I can say you should be looking to these ones: CDI, Servlet 4, JSF, Security, Bean Validation, JAX-RS, JSON-P.

Don’t know the most used application servers

Try this: go now to any recruiter website and search for the Java EE positions. I bet that all of them mention at least one application server.

(If some of them don’t mention, maybe isn’t really a Java EE position… maybe it’s a J2EE one…)

You should at least know the basics of them: how to deploy your application, where to find the logs, how to setup a datasource and so on.

The “must” list for me is: Wildfly, TomEE, Payara, Weblogic, OpenLiberty and Glassfish. If somebody call me names I can increase this list…

Don’t know containers

Ok, now you are wondering “what the heck containers has to do with Java EE?”…

My answer is a clear and confident: everything.

If you are working on the “keep up to date” issue you’ve already realized that we are living what many people call “the containers revolution”.

The IT world lived many revolutions: personal computers, internet, cloud computing… And I truly believe that containers is the revolution of the moment.

Just look around: all the biggest vendors are investing on containers. You will find names like Oracle, AWS, Microsoft, Google just to start.

Go to the Docker Hub and you will find official images for the most application servers and databases. Same for CI/CD tools and so on.

And we are just in the beginning. Containers are still growing, evolving and maturing. Will you wait until everyone has mastered it, except you?

Don’t share what you know

Maybe this is the simplest one. At least simplest to understand…

You can be the Yoda of you area, but it is useless if nobody knows it. A resume will not help with it so much. Actually I don’t know if a resume still works anyway…

So you really need to master the ability to share what you know. Even if you don’t know so much, share it. When you learn something new, share it.

How can you share what you know? Well there are many ways, but I would recommend you one of them: blogging.

Blogging is the best way to start. You start wherever you are and growing as you grow. At the beginning it doesn’t take other investment than your time.

I’ll not deep too much in this subject so I recommend you to try this course: https://simpleprogrammer.com/

Actually you’ll find many interesting courses there. The blogging course used to be free, now it cost US$ 5,00. I think it is still worthy!

Blogging can be followed by other ways of sharing: podcasts, ebooks, Twitter, others social medias… It really works!

 

So what do you think? Are you failing in some of these mistakes? Do you believe in these ways of manage them? Share your thoughts at the comments!