Ask HN: What can I do at home to grow professionally? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What can I do at home to grow professionally?

11 pointsangarg126 comments

I'm looking to grow as a Software Engineer, and I would love to hear ideas about things one can do outside the office to progress your career.

I was going to include a list of things that I've done/I'm doing, but I rather get fresh ideas and not bias the conversation.

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If you're just starting your career, side projects will have the biggest impact. Mastery comes from dedicated practice and side projects are just that. Make sure you're learning new tech, patterns, languages, whatever, but the more you learn now the faster you'll rank up.

If you're more senior, the biggest impacts will come from networking. Figure out where you want your career/life to go, then work towards that. Want to be CTO? Want to work at XYZ tech co? Want to start a business? Doesn't matter, make some friends and start networking.

I'm a big advocate for leveraging the energy of your youth, but make sure you're spending it wisely. There's more to life than working.

One thing I enjoyed that blended a hobby with programming-adjacent skills: building a homelab. You can mess around with hosting things on a raspberry pi or go nuts with rackmounted servers, but I’ve had a lot of fun with it. The more in-depth knowledge you can gain around things like networking and DNS and system administration has helped me a lot in understanding and manipulating the environment my code runs in at my job.

Reading and Exercising are almost definitely going to put in you in an advantageous position

Do some hobbies that aren't related to software at all. Best advance comes from unexpected experience (woodworking, doing meetups, etc.)

Remember it's ok to not code outside work, even if you want to advance professionally. An artisan don't work outside his shop.

In my opinion, side projects are the best way. However the real struggle comes growing professionally as a developer without other people to learn from. If you are doing this full time, you can always gain exposure to others in a local coworking space.

MOOCs, Build things, Network, Learn Sales/ Management skills, Save money (the best way to advance your career is to have options), Read books... a lot of books.

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