Habits to grow as a software engineer

Little tid-bits and habits that have helped me to grow as a software engineer.

Save your rabbit holes 🐰 ➡️ 🕳️

Creating personal post-mortems of long-winded rabbit holes and unusual bugs is a great way to save time and practice your documentation skills. I will often discover an issue that slowly unravels and takes a while to solve. After climbing from the trenches, I detail the error and its solution on a notion page. This habit saved my future self from repeating long Stack Overflow journeys, helped solidify my understanding of various woes, and improved my writing skills.

Take on the unknown 🤔

Taking on work that I’m unfamiliar with has helped strengthen my problem-solving skills. At my job (and in my free time) I love working on new things that are unfamiliar. Diving into sprint tickets involving new frameworks or new parts of the stack is satisfying. There’s the excitement of learning something new and the satisfaction you feel when you finally figure it out. Over time, my comfort level with approaching new tasks and problems has greatly grown thanks to this habit.

The daily Hacker News posts have become my morning newspaper, keeping me motivated and aware of current tech trends. Every morning I take some time to read the first page posts that stand out. As a result, I have come across amazing people like Aaron Swartz and Julia Evans. It is also a great place to grow your knowledge bank.

The daily.dev chrome extension is also quite enjoyable. Many of the posts shown aren’t necessarily from Hacker News, and it has some nice customizable features.

Thanks for reading! 👋