Expert Action Items - 1

Hello Everyone,

In this series, I will share key takeaways from software industry experts and create action items for active improvement.

(Personally) sustainable social media.

https://filiph.net/text/(personally)-sustainable-social-media.html

• Rather than wasting time creating content for social media, do something more useful, such as:
  • Build your website (or products)
  • Create courses
  • Make games
  • Write your books.
• Your chances of having a real impact with these are small, but are still orders of magnitude higher than with a Facebook post.
• Be intentional about what social media you use.
• Do not use one platform for everything; use one for specific tasks, such as Discord for memes or forums to discuss industry trends.

Stop Being a Junior

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/stop-being-a-junior

• Tech moves fast, and there is no fixed time for how long you must be a junior.
• If you stick to a few technologies, you can master them quickly.
• You can volunteer to do more complicated tasks at work.
• Do public speaking, such as Volunteering for local meetups and conferences.
• Showcase your accomplishments

Intentional Career Building

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/intentional-career-building

• If you can solve other people’s problems, share the solution publicly. It can help others as well and boost your credibility.
• Focus on quality by solving problems you are dealing with; other people might have the same problem, too.
• Publish content under your domain.

5 Junior Software Engineer Learning Traps

https://www.jointaro.com/blog/5-junior-software-engineer-learning-traps-and-how-to-avoid-them/

• Tutorials are just a starting point. Leave the tutorial phase immediately and switch to building stuff such as side projects or open-source contributions.
• Only get certifications that are a hard requirement for the job.
• Doing competitive programming is overkill for programming interviews. LeetCode is enough.
• Build in public, including making your source code open-source and getting feedback on your ideas.
• Don’t waste time picking your ideal tech; execution is more important.

Why should developers write? Three reasons and three common blocks

https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/why-should-developers-write-3-reasons-and-3-common-blocks

Benefits of writing:

• A published articles indicate that a developer is committed to professional self-improvement.
• Writing leads to more profound knowledge as you teach yourself before teaching others.
• Publishing allows you to be up to date with technology trends.

Blockers and how to avoid them:

• Not knowing which topic to write about
  • Think about any challenge you had at work.
  • Did other people struggle to implement something that you were doing?
  • An interesting conversation with a colleague
• Exposure:
  • Write on a platform with a large and friendly community, such as dev.to or Medium
  • Share articles on social media.
  • Write for a newsletter.
• Procrastination
  • Take small steps
  • Write an initial draft first and then make improvements on subsequent re-reads
  • Promise yourself a reward after completing a text.

Action items for this week based on the blogs:

• Create a habit of writing. For me, I will write one blog per week.
• Share your blog on social media when you write them (Instagram, LinkedIn, etc).
• Start looking into how to contribute to open source.
• Write code in public (Public GitHub Repos) so you can get feedback from peers or mentors. I will make three public GitHub commits per day.
• Go to one local meetup per week.
• Start working on ideation for a side project.
• Solve one LeetCode problem every day.

For repeated tasks, I will consider them as complete after 66 days.

If you have any feedback, please feel free to contact me.