As long as I observe a lot of senior developers or tech lead, as many tips I find out to confidently change our profile LinkedIn with Senior Software Engineer.
Here is some main habits that I noted:
- Take Responsibility
- Problem Solving
- Soft Skills
- Clean code
- Build side projects
- Always think about how to improve yourself
- Guide someone.
Notes: If you want to move one more step in your career, try to learn management skill. You would say I was wrong, since you only want to build the technical career path instead of management stuff. Imagine yourself as a technical lead with team of 10+ people, and ask how to run the process smoothly with 10+ different characteristic.
Whether you want to be recognized, you must learn the management skill. Refer to this book summaries for more details
1. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
What I have learned from Senior Developers / Tech Lead is they are always proactive with their job. They work with high responsibility to handle every issue.
Responsibility is a scary word, since you will face to depression when people react to what you’ve done. Getting over and being brave will make you growing up day by day.
Embrace more interaction with issues and tasks will help you archive more ownership of your code and technical debts of your business.
2. PROBLEM-SOLVING
- Technology Solutions (Framework, Libraries…)
Trying many different frameworks/libraries is good, but being master one of them is the key you understand how it works so far. Yourself or your colleagues will always ask many questions about the reason we approach those technologies, indeed understanding will help you to explain to the team.
- Infrastructure Solutions
There is not correct solution for all systems, trade-off what you have and deal with it. Don’t be over automic thinking, sacrify portion that stopping you reach the goal.
You don’t need to be experienced in a lot of kind of systems, what you need is knowledge to solve the problem. I recommend you to read system design topic on leetcode, read book as much as possible, prepare good basic of complexity of algorithms.
3. SOFT SKILLS
Communication is the key when you work in a big team. Imagine you are manager of the project, it will be terrible when your teammates just never let you know the issues, progress of the tasks, right!?
Issues/Pull Requests discussing culture. Code review culture is some tips to help you collobrate with others by problem-oriented instead of human-oriented.
Find some articles or evidences to prove your viewpoint. As long as you discuss by numbers and clearance explanation, you are building trust and steady reputation in the team.
4. CLEAN CODE
Clean code is also a name of the popular book, which you should read to write good.
When we work in a team with 3-5 people or more in the repository, the only thing you can catch up with the logic is reading every commits and file changed. It’s not only duty in the project, you can learn from others code and found some bad code.
There are some takeaway key points in the book:
- Unit test and well documented
- Write readable code
- Build CI/CD + code linter
- Investigate design pattern.
Writing small methods and give them meaningful names. Always think about this if you want to reduce complaints when reviewing code or inherit to a newcomer.
5. SIDE PROJECTS
One day, you have an idea to implement an online mentor service? Just do it as fast as possible. Implementing algorithm for mentor/mentee matching, building a basic frontend… will help you to understand all domains of software. And important thing - FINISH IT.
Try to approach as many different techniques as possile. These things will make you debate yourself, and they are good things. You will have an overview of solutions afterwards.
For myself side projects, I usually implement some design system lessons to improve my architecture skills. TinyURL
6. ALWAYS THINK ABOUT HOW TO IMPROVE YOURSELF
As short time you realized your code smell as fast you growing up. Good people never stick themselves into their safe zone, always staying hungry staying foolish is the reason why they are better than yesterday.
I was exhausted with my mentor before because he consumed lots of things day by day, the following month he always applied new lib, framework or pattern. That also how the world-changing nowaday. Be a better version of yourself.
Buy all the popular books with your domain related. Learn new tech skills and blog them every months. Nothing else is more important than upgrading yourself to next level.
Last thing, review skill sets and measure it every year.
7. GUIDE SOMEONE
Guiding someone will consolidate your knowledge and handle edge cases of the problem. Guiding is not only helping others, it also helps you to build your confidence in many ways. Try to explain complex things in a simple way for people not only tech but business can understand your idea.
Sometimes you will understand the fundamental of problems just by stupid questions.