12 tips to grow as a developer

1. Work on open source (minimum 6 months per project).

2. Have mentors/people to learn from (or be friends with people who’ve been in field longer than you).

3. Help developers on Stackoverflow. (Pay special attention to questions than the answers, you can learn a lot).

4. Start on your own or work on companies projects/tasks that nobody wants to work on.

5. Read clean code book. (in any order, pick the useful bits and save them somewhere).

6. Find a truly legacy codebase and start improving it.

7. Read newsletter/articles to be aware of possibilities/tools/ideas/thoughts.

8. Get really serious about planning and documenting your code. (do this once a week atleast)

9. Browse other peoples code and take NOTES about it’s architecture and git commit history.

10. Learn the difference betwen Tech stack that’ll get you hired VS Tech stack that will make you productive. Don’t underestimate tools that make you productive.

11. Build your own library/packages and release to public (build something that you yourself will use).

12. Do use ChatGPT as a code buddy/rubber duck. Don’t fully rely on it. There’s no replacement for thoughts that start in you.