Ask HN: How do you become a better software engineer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you become a better software engineer?

1 pointtnel773 comments

Hello! While I have come a long way from undergrad, I still have so much to learn in the world of software engineering. I prefer learning via a more hands on approach, but I’m not against reading either.

I’m just curious what resources (tutorials, books, blogs, etc.) you use to keep your software engineering skills sharp.

Edit: I personally work 99% on backend stuff. Currently, I use Typescript and our infrastructure is handled via code thanks to Amazon’s Typescript CDK library. For example, I know very little about the inner workings of AWS infrastructure and I don’t fully understand all the syntax when I review code related to our infrastructure. I have read quite a bit of the AWS documentation, but it’s just not clicking for me. Resources for learning more about AWS’ offerings is one of many topics I’d love to learn more about, but even general software engineering knowledge that applies to all languages/technologies would be appreciated as well.

Build things. Build BIG things!

Most programmers never have to build anything big or complicated. After you've done it a few times, and having to refactor parts of your code because you designed it poorly, then you start figuring out how to avoid those mistakes in the future. That is the definition of "getting better".

You will also learn things that you didn't know you didn't know. For example, I'm working on a programming language as a library that is publicly available as an open source project. On Monday, I realized that I needed to figure out a better (stable) way to compile it as a shared library and then write an install script to install it globally so that other projects could compile/execute against it on their system. It took ~5 hours to figure out and document, but I learned A LOT about how shared libraries work in Linux (and the fact that the loader vs. the compiler linker search for libraries differently, etc.). Most importantly, I enjoyed it!

Started to code assembly in my teen.

The hard part is to study later real maths and sciences at uni/college: yeah... 99% of programming out there does not require more than high-school skills.

Personal projects, personal projects, personal projects :)

And when you feel like your skills are developed enough, consider helping out an open-source project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com