Ask HN: How to spend the next 500 days to become a good programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to spend the next 500 days to become a good programmer?

2 pointsFahadUddin922 comments

Hi. I am a 26 year old Computer Engineering grad that has worked in the industry for 5 years. I have mostly worked with WordPress and now I am a devops engineer. I want to dedicate the next 500 days to do things that have the maximum impact and helps me with the following:

--> Get jobs from top tech companies

--> My resume starts to look impressive

--> I grow in my career

Can someone please give me advice on how to do it? I have read lots of advice on the internet like teach yourself programming in 10 years etc and I am following that. Here I am looking for some quick wins. Thanks.

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My favourite goal of yours is the third one. The first two will come after you achieve that :)

I'd say do whatever you do already with some extra curiosity and long-term view thrown in. You're probably using a text editor in your current job. Why not take time to learn some shortcuts in it during the next couple of tasks (and do them slower).

You're probably also using Unix. You could learn what actually happens when you do, say, `ls`, if you don't know yet.

Reflect on what you're doing and what you just did, what was inefficient or bad, and whether you could have done it better - that's always good for learning stuff.

Along with other great comments I would like to mention that in today's world the easiest and "quick win" for a developer to gain some publicity and huge momentum in his career path is to embrace open source.

There are many pathways for it, but start as a contributor then moderator and if for some reason original development team loses the interest in the project you can become the maintainer of it as well. The more popular the project the more benefits you can get and it is also a trend nowadays in talent acquisition by some well-known startups and even few enterprises. The world is changing fast, the new doors are opening, follow that!

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