Learning Quickly Q&A and Videos

I have a question about doing self-reviews. I'm not talking about doing them in the context of a company's performance review. I'm talking about doing them totally for myself regarding my own personal development, including my job, side-projects, learning, etc. It might even include more personal stuff like health and fitness, relationships, etc.

I recall Rahul mentioning something about setting aside a half hour at the beginning of every week to plan the week and take stock of last week. I also believe he says something about doing a quarterly review.

My questions are:

1. What do these weekly and quarterly reviews looks like, i.e. how should I go about doing them?

2. Is there more than just weekly and quarterly reviews? i.e. daily, monthly, annual?

3. Do these reviews involve planning out the next week/quarter or is that a separate exercise?

4. Is there a difference between doing self-reviews/planning when it comes to work vs. personal career development vs. personal life? Or is the approach/process the same?

I know different people do different stuff and YMMV, I'm looking for good habits I might apply to my own life!

Thanks!

For someone starting to study Systems Design for interviews, is there a roadmap we should follow so that we understand concepts in increasing order of difficulties?

Hello, I've seen the term "maintenance projects" (basically, projects where you do bug fixing most of the time) and green field projects (projects where you write code from scratch).

I've been told that the maintenance projects are generally the ones that you want to avoid since you won't learn much.

I didn't see this view against software projects on TARO, like to divide the projects in to these categories from a high level view and I was wondering if you guys can tell me more about this business view of the software projects.

Are there other categories besides maintenance and greenfield? How can I avoid maintenance ones or recognize them?

I work at a pretty early stage startup and I've historically only done backend. There's been a lot of new scope on the frontend side and so I'm now having to start getting some of the frontend features working as well. But the issue is the codebase seems to be using a lot of the newer frontend techstack like next.js, tailwind CSS and redux and whatnot.

I've never written any frontend so I'm kind of starting from scratch. How do you recommend I tackle this?

I know the common taro advice is to learn by doing but given that frontend is almost a different skillset I'm not sure what's the best approach.

Should I spend some time watching lessons or tutorials or try and hack together a small side project or should I just learn as I go?

Hi Taro community,

I currently have 1 YOE as a SWE at a large bank and I am on STEM OPT. I want to be more intentional with my career.

In short - I want to know how to get domain expertise. My tech stack is mostly python, SQL, and some Angular. In short, I don't feel like an 'engineer' at all and since it's a bank things don't move that fast and I feel like I will get complacent or obsolete with how fast the tech landscape is evolving with artificial intelligence.

My issue is I don't think I am gaining the 'depth' of knowledge that I would hope to acquire. I am just working on stories as they come and the knowledge I am getting is mostly proprietary to the org I belong to. I can't see how transferable the knowledge will be.

I am trying to figure out what my next move should be. So far I have tried:

• Applying to other jobs. The bad thing is that the tech job market is awful and while I don't mind leetcode, it becomes a parasitic activity that leeches on my free time.
• Switching to another team - roadblock here too. We have a hiring freeze.
• I've had some luck interviewing with startups but unfortunately a lot of them don't sponsor. I actually think that had my visa situation not been a problem, a startup would be a great way to supercharge in improving my skills.
• Build projects - I've seen this advice on here before and it seems like the only wiggle room I have until something better comes up. But, as far as projects, past a certain point they are just toys I feel - they lack the complexity, and business context that makes a good engineer. I mean after all, engineering is a team sport. Also, I am not sure how it gives me the 'depth' that I want.
• Courses/Technical papers? This is another option I am thinking of: maybe start or join a reading group for technical papers and try to re-implement and discuss the concepts discussed? Maybe brushing up on computer science fundamentals/system design will help?

I am a little worried because it seems like I will be at this job for a while - which is not a bad thing because I'm very lucky to have one to start with, but at the same time, I don't want to be left behind.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to reading your comments!

In, Alex answered that the key insight behind rapid career growth is good communication.

He points the reader to the "Effective Communication for Software Engineers" course and some other resources.

I feel like a ton of effective communication is , and so finding a good way to teach it outside of observing those who are already good at communication in the context a job is tricky. Specific case studies could be really helpful. I think Alex's course and the other linked resources were a really good introduction to effective communication, but if this is the key skill behind great performance I want to learn more! I've put most of the tips and tricks that Alex taught into practice at my current job and it's really improved my performance and my managers' trust in me already. A huge mindset shift for me was that it's better to risk over-communication than under-communication; it's better to be aligned but slightly annoyed by receiving a lot of messages than not aligned.

My question is: What is a good way to go about building my effective communication skills? Are there more really high-quality resources you recommend for building good communication skills?

Many people including me struggle to understand large codebases, especially when we start at a new company. It might be due to legacy code or just size/complexity of the codebase.

Alex/Rahul have already advised on talking 1:1 with team members + breaking stuff to see how things work. I would still love to see a live deep dive on few large codebases to learn how you would get familiar with the codebase asap.

Would it be possible to make such a course?

Thanks!