The Rational Software Engineer
Description
This book will serve as a framework for you as a software engineer seeking a fulfilling career and wishing to stay passionate and maintain a healthy mental state. It is filled with protocols to achieve effective life-long learning, navigate career development, adapt to changes, maintain work-life balance, and have a healthy lifestyle.
As a successful software engineer you tend to focus on improving your technical skills: learning a new programming language, mastering another tool, or using a library. But you also need to build a solid mental framework that will help you navigate your professional development. You need to develop the skills that will help you be a happy software engineer.
This book will help you if you feel frustrated, unmotivated, or unhappy; lost in your career path; or uncertain if you want to be a software engineer. It can help you deal with burnout, high levels of stress, or depression; or if you struggle to be productive while working from home.
What You Will Learn
- Efficiently organize your work day
- Know when and how to seek a new project, company, or career
- Take care of your body and mind in a software engineering context
- Understand what contributes to job satisfaction and how to integrate it into your career
- Use non-coding activities for your and your company's benefit
- Build healthy relationships with managers and colleagues
Who This Book Is For
The typical reader of this book is a software engineer who is highly skilled in technical areas but may feel frustrated, unmotivated, or unhappy in their current position and looking for a way to navigate their professional development and find a healthy work-life balance.
The book also will appeal to audiences of other IT or tech professionals, such as project managers, product owners, or designers, who work closely with software engineers and want to understand the challenges they face in their roles. Additionally, individuals who are considering a career in software engineering or development may benefit from the book by gaining insight into the profession and understanding the skills and mindset required to be successful.
Reviews / Votes
"Readers will find the book organized into three thematic pillars of passion, attitude, and learning. ... The book is written in a readable, uncluttered style to make it accessible to any technical specialty. ... the book succeeds at what it wishes to accomplish. ... The book's most suitable audience is software engineers or other professionals who want to slow down, take stock, and think more reflectively in terms of planning their next working stage." (Aditya Gupta, Computing Reviews, September 25, 2025)
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Person
Mykyta Chernenko, originally from Kharkiv, Ukraine, now resides in Oslo, Norway. Beginning with Backend with Python, Mykyta soon expanded his toolkit to include Fullstack development and diverse languages like Go, Kotlin, and Typescript. Beyond his main technical focus, Mykyta has experience in DevOps, Data Engineering and Product Management.
Throughout his professional journey, Mykyta has been a part of various intriguing projects through his experience in product, outsource, and consultancy companies. He contributed to the Azure integration of Nutanix's cluster discovery project, and played a central technical role at Factmata, taking over the engineering and infrastructure. He further continued to product teams at both Mercell as a Tech Lead and as a Senior Software Engineer at Arundo Analytics.
Separate from his project contributions, Mykyta has shown a strong passion for teaching and sharing his experience. He has taken on mentoring roles throughout his career, guiding and supporting over 20 professionals in the field, and expressed himself through his blog, "The Rational Software Engineer" on Hackernoon.
Understanding that Software Engineering is driven by people and their thinking, Mykyta consistently tries to broaden his horizons in the psychology and neurobiology realm through books and courses.
Now Mykyta is a Co-Founder of Nemlys - a promising tech startup dedicated to helping couples improve their communication through personalized AI questions for their dates.