Junior Software Engineer

At this point, it is assumed that you have followed the fundamentals of Reading, Writing, Discourse.

To accelerate yourself as a junior software engineer, you should pour in time to practice the following:

• Typing speed - You don't need to practice with a typing game. You already do coding and programming for a living- just focus on building and programming faster and faster.

• Keyboard shortcuts - At some point, your improvement in your typing speed will slowly plateau, in which case you should now begin to think carefully about how you interface with your computer. What are common actions that you frequently do? (e.g. using the Command Palette on VS Code or navigating your inbox in Gmail).

• Learning quickly and sharing your notes - This is a two-pronged challenge. Not only do you have to learn very rapidly, you need to consume content and critically analyze topics as well as synthesize ideas into simpler concepts when you explain it to your colleagues, both technical and non-technical. This is the sandbox of polishing your communication skills.

• Read documentation voraciously and try it for yourself - As a software engineer, you need to develop the confidence and discipline of always referring to the available documentation to verify how a tool, package, or system works and verifying usual cases and edge-cases to check whether it behaves as you expect. This is what it means to "speak the computer's language" and to be fluent in it.

  • Documentation is often outdated and broken. Learning how a machine behaves (and practicing the skill of theorizing why a system works or not is what senior-level software engineers do).

• Participate in hackathons or create one - These can be public events, or you can just run a hackathon for yourself on your own. The important thing is to relentlessly pursue the solving of a certain problem. This is the sandbox for your discipline and focus. Can you push yourself hard to deliver results when you need to? In that sense, it is also a sandbox for confidence and emotional resilience.