C++ developer Soft skills Hard skills At first, some of the skills may seem impossible to develop. However, we think differently. It is possible to work on each of the skills. Everything depends on your desire and internal blocks. Everything is individual, and it's up to you to decide. :) Ability to learn Manage mistakes Thinking Responsibility Manage resources Communication Team work Emotional intelligence Understanding the development context Customer focus Technology Trends Empathy Concentration Open-mindedness Adaptability Stress resistance Working in uncertainty Understanding the distribution of roles in a team Support team members Work in a distributed team Providing feedback Leadership Mentoring Delegation Assigning and clarifying tasks to employees Planning and goal setting Negotiation English Presentation Written communication skill Networking Ability to listen Persuasion Ability to communicate ideas and thoughts within the team Finding compromises Dispute resolution Providing information to people outside the team Time management Prioritization Taking decisions Blind typing Multitasking Discipline Persistence Initiative Independence Problem solving Logical Critical Creative Strategic Systems Accept criticism Notify about mistakes in time Admitting your mistakes Analyze mistakes Ask the right questions Experimenting Manage knowledge Process information Ability to gather, analyze, evaluate information and make decisions based on it. Reflection Calmly react to what people say. Most likely that they only consider their own context when they try to prove something. This is fine. Evaluate the usefulness of their point of view. Take challenging tasks in order to develop your skills and competencies, even when there is not enough knowledge/experience (skills will develop much faster through such tasks). The main thing is to distinguish a really useful complex task that will help you to boost your skills from a dumb task that requires a scapegoat. You should be responsible for your professional development. Don't wait for the team lead to decide for you what to study. Do not forget that blind adherence to someone else's plan will sharpen your skills according to requirements of a particular company. It is better to discuss and build in your interests into the plan. If this is not done, there is a high risk of getting irrelevant skills, which will hit career opportunities. But don't overdo it: don't study absolutely everything or don't passively wait until a development plan will be created for you. Self-organization The ability to provide the amount of information that is necessary to communicate to people with different backgrounds. Conflict solving If you read this it means you already understand why it is so important :) Usually, it is required at least to read because you would need to understand technical documentation. But as you move up the career ladder, you will need to speak and write more confidently in English. Look for like-minded people and join/create a community for experience exchange. You should study and observe contemporary trends to be competitive, as well as being able to adapt to them. Experienced developers should develop management skills and business communication skills to complete tasks efficiently. It is easier to do if you have developed emotional intelligence. For a junior developer, the skill is also useful to better interact with colleagues. 1 step Folder 1 Basic operations Arithmetic operations Loops: for/while Logical operations Bitwise operations Functions lambda Operators Data types Dynamic typing Static typing RTTI Pointers & References Codebase structuring References Memory model Smart pointer Raw pointers Code splitting into headers/cpp files Scope Memory leakage Forward declaration unique_ptr shared_ptr Lifetime of objects new/delete operators weak_ptr Namespaces The overloading of regular set of operators for regular or custom types (structures/classes). To prevent memory leakage problems it is better to use smart pointers rather than raw pointers. 2 step Folder 2 Structures and classes Exception handling Overloading of functions Virtual table (vtbl) Object Oriented programming (OOP) Exceptions Access violation Dynamic polymorphism Virtual methods The rule of zero/three/five Static polymorphism Multiple inheritance Diamond inheritance Error codes It's preferred to avoid multiple inheritance (excepting abstract classes) to prevent runtime issues 3 step Folder 3 auto (automatic type deduction) Language concepts type casting static_cast const_cast dynamic_cast reinterpret_cast Undefined Behavior (UB) Argument-dependent lookup (ADL) Macros Name mangling Standard library iostream Algorithms Iterators Containers Date/time Multithreading Some of language constructions have non-declared behavior according to the ISO standard. In case of any error, it's not possible to predict further behavior. It depends on a platform environment, runtime context, etc. 4 step Folder 4 Templates Variadic templates The template specialization type traits SFINAE The full template specialization The partial template specialization RAII pimpl Erase-Remove Non-Copyable/Non-Moveable Copy and swap Copy on write CRTP Standards C++11/14 C++17 C++20 newest C++0x Idioms 1 step Folder 5 Working with source code Text editors IDE Code editors Debugger Linters Knowledge of features and abilities (shortcuts, tools, plugins) Understanding of debugger messages Debugging symbols WinDbg GDB Choose one of the popular IDEs and study it well: Eclipse, MS Visual Studio, Qt Creator, JetBrains Clion, XCode, etc. Study how to use a debugger and all its features Choose one of the popular editors and study it well. For example: Notepad++, Atom, etc. The ability to work with a debugger via command line is a not common skill. It's sufficient to work with it via IDE. For example: set conditional breakpoints, etc. Learn about common errors (segfault, out of memory, access violation) and undefined behavior concept. Choose one of the popular editors and study it well. For example: Visual Code, Atom, Sublime Text, etc. 3 step Folder 6 Compilers Basic understanding of compilers stages Compilation of sources to object files (compilation) The object files linkage (linking) Working stages of compilers Manufacturer-dependent compilers Each compiler has its nuances. It's good to know about them to prevent getting any trap:  Clang++/LLVM, Intel C++, MSVS C++, GCC, MinGW The compiler performs several stages of code compilation. It's good to know about all of them to better understand compilation issues. Deep knowledge is needed for compiler creators only. 5 step Folder 7 Build systems CMake Makefile ninja Package managers vcpkg spack Conan nuget Libraries boost opencv poco Libraries inclusion protobuf gRPC fmt pybindll spdlog ranges_v3 tensorflow opencl Frameworks gtest/gmock Qt catch2 google profiler pytorch c++ 1 step Folder 8 Computers Science Data structures Algorithms Boolean algebra Finite-state machines It's also good to know how to calculate algorithm complexity and memory consumption. 4 step Folder 9 Version control software Distributed Centralized SVN git Mercurial Best practices Code quality Code guidelines Principles of development KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) APO (Avoid Premature Optimization) BDUF (Big Design Up Front) Composition is preferably than the inheritance Occam's razor Divide and Conquer Logging and telemetry Code review Skill to read existing code sources Skill to review code Lifecycle stages of a software Implementation Testing Maintanance Versioning Unit tests Integration tests Functional tests Performance tests Software architecture and components design Components integration Deployment Collecting requirements End of a software lifecycle Code analyzers Static analyzers Dynamic analyzers Profilers C++ core guidelines Industrial standards MISRA Autosar Command line batch Powershell bash CI/CD Trunk Based Development Zero downtime deployment Creation of a software deployment package Documentation Installer package Usage of other programming languages Language interoperability Naming conventions, tabs vs spaces, etc. To configure automated code formatting verification with one of the suitable utilities: clang-format, Resharper - code style, MSVS - code style. - Scripting - Functional - SQL like - NoSQL Sometimes it's needed to provide an ability to reuse a library written in a different language from another one. For example: to call C++ libraries in C#. Backward compatibility Software design Architecture styles Component-based Monolithic application Layered Client-server Microservices architecture Event-driven Plug-ins REST Service-oriented architecture 2 step Folder 10 Design Patters (GoF) Behavioral Structural Creational OOP SOLID UML Architecture patterns MVC MVVM Three-tier Onion Hexagon Methodologies of development Test Driven Development Behavior Driven Development Domain Driven Design Memory Memory abstractions Memory alignment Memory management Binary units Executable file Static library Dynamic library Stack Global memory Heap Application memory Virtual memory Operating systems Multithreading Errors Dead lock Race condition Live lock Starvation Threads Concurrency Mutexes Semaphores lock-free Event handling Sync Async Process Interprocess communication Shared memory Pipes Serialization json XML Network TCP/IP OSI Sockets HTTP TCP UDP File system Task scheduler Virtualization VirtualBox VMware Workstation Containers Hyper-V Docker Cloud Services Kubernetes Security Encryption MultiCPU systems Multicore CPU NUMA Input/output Drivers Audio Graphics Printers (printing) DirectSound OpenAL DirectX Vulkan OpenGL CUDA Common skills Language tools Language syntax C++ Developer Roadmap About: C ++ is still one of the most popular development languages. There is quite a number of people that want to start learning it and become a C++ developer. They face questions like: "Where should I start? What and in what order should I study? What books should I read?" We tried to answer these questions in the presented roadmap. The map focuses on general competencies and skills that could be found in most projects. It is designed to help those who are just starting their education or have little experience. You can create a more productive learning plan without being distracted by side information if you study the set of listed materials. It will help you to master C++ at the level that is used in many commercial projects. How to use: If you have any feedback or remarks don't hesitate to contact us. We really appreciate it. :) To contact us choose one of the following Github approaches: - For any remarks related to repository content - go to Pull Requests and submit a new one Feedback: Optional Junior Middle Senior The middle developer has the skills to create a design for new functionality as a part of a component/application if even there're not enough requirements or information presented. The senior developer has the skills to create a design and make decisions for a solution/component taking into account business area context. The junior must acquire the following skill as soon as possible: to write easy-readable and well-structured code. The juniors should be aware of middle/senior skills. It's enough to have a basic understanding of them. The "steps" are presented on this map. They're intended to show an easy for newbies to be able to get confident base knowledge about the language at the beginning. Repository: https://github.com/salmer/CppDeveloperRoadmap