Learning Quickly Q&A and Videos

I'm wondering about the dynamics (plusses and minuses) of having a personal mentor. Taro is fantastic in that it gives me access to the best software engineers to answer all the tech-related questions I can think of.

Still, I'm wondering if there are advantages to having a specific mentor, someone a few years senior to me who's in the position I want to be in. The idea would be that they could show me what to focus on to develop my career in a way that is more individualized. I write this as I've just been matched with Orbiit which I'm super excited about, but not sure if that's mentorship so much as peer-to-peer.

I got the mentorship idea from a company called SharpestMinds, which focuses on project-focused mentorship for career switchers for Data and SWE roles.

This question isn't about them, but the idea of personal mentorship more generally.

So to summarize, I have 3 questions:

1. Why should I get a designated mentor?
2. How do I get a personal mentor?
3. What should I do as a mentee in a mentor-mentee relationship?

What are some of the best resources to learn front-end development?

I want to build a startup (SaaS).

Looking forward to some great motivation and career advice. I am 55 years old and work for a local software company as support engineer for the last 5 years. Through out my 30 year old career, I have held jobs as software engineer. But in last few years I have lost my confidence.

I was advised to get into FAANG and for last 1 year I have been going through interview prep resources like LeetCode, AlgoExpert, and practicing from books like CTCI for interview prep. And then thanks to Chat GPT, AI, I lost my interest in becoming a good or even an average software engineer.

So I would like to get motivated, get a software engineer buddy here on Taro, who understands challenges of mindset at my age. I would like to expand my outlook and get energized about software engineering career. Or may be launch a SAAS application of some sort. Thanks for reading.

I recently joined my team, and I've been sort of overwhelmed picking up this new tech stack which may be leading to some procrastination. I literally have to Google for everything I want to write. Twitter also has certain in-house technologies, which are pretty challenging to learn. I also started working on a critical project recently with strict deadlines due to headcount shortage.

I saw this as an opportunity to make an impact and am trying my best, but I wish I had more time to get acquainted with the stack. I feel like I lost a few days last week unraveling through the ambiguity and getting context, so I didn't make progress with implementation as much as I wanted to.

I am kinda anxious that I will miss my delivery in the first project which is not setting a right impression. In my experience, there is no excuse for missed delivery and it will treated as a red flag. It's a newer company for me and my org is revenue-generating. Given the phase Twitter is going through, this project is critical and hence I am hesitant to push back on the timelines too.

I also see mid-level and junior engineers on the project moving way faster than me right now, because of their tenure and familiarity with codebase and that can be disheartening.

Lastly, should I be transparent and discuss with my manager if I feel a few days haven't been productive? I don't see any way that will help.

Any recommended resources that I should invest as part of my education budget?

I am Backend software Engineer and I am interested in moving to Staff software engineer role in future.

I'm struggling to come up with a way forward as a software engineer. My path to my job today has been VERY unconventional. I failed out of computer science at my university. I still have a degree but in an unrelated field. Did a lot of hackathons and got internships and finally a return offer from a decent ecommerce firm as a software engineer. I know the market is really bad right now but I can tell that I have a lot of prerequisites I'm missing. Trying to do better and I've started taking courses again. I want to craft a self taught dev path. And I want to do well but I just don't know where to begin

Layoffs are making me quite anxious. I understand job security might not really be a thing when it comes to big tech, but I do want to try pursuing employment security, if that makes sense. How do I "get good" so I can be a little more resilient when it comes to layoffs and employment? I'm not really sure where to start.

Little Context: I work on a product that is distributed system with ML and large data processing pipelines, with all the fancy terms and components. But I work on a specific component that in itself is not much more complex than a microservice. I do jump on every opportunity to work on cross-team projects in order to expand my knowledge and to be honest, I understand my company's architect very well. At least, I know what is there. Why is it there, that part I am not confident about?

Since I wasn't one of the first few engineers there, I don't know why it is architected the way it is. I haven't experienced the tradeoff that they had to make to build the system, the way it is now. And this learning I have been craving for some time.

I have been reading all about distributed systems for a year and a half. Read that famous Designing Data-intensive applications book page to page, and a few other popular courses and resources. But I want hands-on experience.

What actions can I take to optimize and practice my learning about building distributed systems?

I acknowledge that this "distributed systems" is a highly overloaded term, but ideally, I want to practice building more complex and end-to-end systems.

Thanks.

As I'm starting to join a team soon(and knowing this answer varies by team, level, and company), I'm wondering how long does onboarding take and what does it mean to be fully onboarded within your team

Is it effective when doing this as a tech worker? I'm also wondering how it varies by company type.

I am onboarding at a new company. Sometimes, I feel I am completely lost when my teammates were explaining something to me. The reasons I can find may include

1. I am lacking the understanding of the architecture or the context
2. Their explanation uses phrases I do not know what they mean or how they work

In this situation, how should I respond to my teammates? Thanks in advance!

I'm going to be joining Amazon soon and the team I'm on is going from 4/5 people a month ago to I believe 9/10 people (counting me). Our team is going to be comprised of SDE 2's and 1's (I'm an SDE 1).

I'm wondering what's the best way to have the best onboarding experience during this time.

While it will be nice that I will have a decent amount of people who will be in the same boat as me in terms of onboarding, I'm also worried that my manager and more senior teammates won't have as much time for things like 1 on 1s, answering questions, helping me onboard, etc. if they're also helping other people on our team in addition to their own work.

Context:

• There is little to no documentation
• We are extremely focused on shipping rapidly
• Everyone is occupied to the fullest with their own tasks
• The codebase and architecture is a mess to deal with
• The dev environment is unfriendly to work with

Questions:

• For our success (and survival), we need to keep shipping features and products that bring in business. How do I get onboarded quickly so that I can start shipping too?
• Is there any value in following typical processes and best practices like 1:1s, project planning etc.?

Hello. I did kind of ask about this before, but now it's more prevalent dilemma for me as I'm actively interviewing and many of my best opportunities are asking for someone who ALSO has a software engineering background:

Scenario: This past year at working an AWS Cloud Consulting Partner I only grew my cloud and Terraform skills and it was my first professional role. I didn't have any software engineering mentoring and I had very little programming work outside Terraform, but I got to mess with a few different languages in my spare time and still haven't decided on one to main. So I figure it needs to be a language & framework good for an ambitious one-man project (possibly a PWA) that I can be passionate about which would drive my learning, provide a great and productive developer experience so I can build some epic stuff myself and learn from it.

Basically, I need a versatile, productive, "startupy" programming language that can be my "main" and kill two birds with one stone here as I have entrepreneurial ambitions:

What do I like doing? What am I passionate about? Well, game dev with Godot. But it uses GDscript and job prospects with it are nill. So I'm considering making a game website PWA like the old as a one man show. So definitely a scalable full-stack CRUD project. I want my development experience to be as productive as possible, and for that reason I'm now considering mainly the firs two options here:

1. Ruby on Rails (despite it being the butt of many jokes and claims that its dead) . It being "batteries included" and everything else I hear about it is that its super productive and fun. I have not tried it yet though. It might be an ace because I see a number of "remote work from anywhere" opportunities for ruby devs to work on legacy code, i.e Gitlab, but I'm really wary of it being a bad choice to specialize in for my career.

2. Blazor with NetCore C# - Blazor is new tech with inherent risk, but it would allow me to focus on one language and framework while doing the full stack (I think similar to Ruby with the "batteries included" approach.). There's a risk of Blazor being new, but the Net Core skills I obtain will always be relevant. On the contrary, with javascript I felt like what I knew was never enough, there was always another framework or some abstraction on top of React, or new way to do JS I had to learn, which I found extremely frustrating. I'm really not a Javascript fan because of that, but if I had to, I'd probably try Svelte. But the point is, I'm trying to avoid bouncing around the way I have been. I really need to be an expert with one language and framework, and I'd like to be able to "do it all" with that language and framework for it to have an opinionated way with best practices so I can get up and running quickly and learn the skills I building an awesome project.

3. Golang - I started looking at Golang because of it being said that it has an opinionated way of doing things rather than a 20x ways to do one thing which was very appealing to me. Also it's cloud reputation, compiling down to a binary. BUT - it seems its for microservices rather than an impressive full stack startup project. I'm not sure how motivated I'd be making an API instead of a complete project like the PWA game site I mentioned. I really don't want to have to switch to JS for a React front end to get up and running. For this reason, I'm also not sure if Python is a good choice compared with the first two options. I know it has a templating feature, but can I do it all with that?

Can I get some opinions and advice? I'm looking for a new job and need to build up my core software skills fast as possible:

Speed, productivity, specializing in a worthwhile language and learning core software engineering through making an awesome PWA project are my main targets for this.

After working for 5 years in startups and small companies, this is my first time in BigTech. I constantly feel that while I am able to get tasks done, I still lack in fundamentals. This sometimes leads to embarrassing situations where I am not able to answer basic questions during normal conversations.

I would really like to not only brush up but master my fundamentals of being a software engineer.

If we were to make a list of fundamentals that strong software engineers have mastered, what would that list look like?

In tech, there are an endless amount of books and articles to read, and videos to watch. My browser tabs have grown to the point where I use Onetab to bookmark tab groups that I will eventually get around to...

I also have a long list of improvements, tech debt, and ideas for work and personal that I implement when I have the time. I prioritize and accomplish things every week, but I still feel perpetually behind. This is an internal struggle I deal with, and I don't think this feeling will ever go away. What do you recommend I do to finally feel like I am ahead of the ball?

I am not confident whenever I try to code a new library or a service. I simply copy-paste, look at other samples in the coding repo, and complete my tasks. How can I be better at coding, without copy-pasting? How can I gain confidence in this?

I work at a small company with only 10 engineers. Since it’s so small, there’s no real feedback culture - We don't have a formal performance review system.

Everything I’m hearing is always positive - Everyone just tells me I’m always surpassing expectations and doing well. However, I know that there's a lot I can improve as I'm an earlier-in-career engineer. I want real feedback so I can get better and understanding the path from junior -> mid-level -> senior: What can I do to start getting this feedback?

What is a good way to ask questions in a domain where you lack knowledge? How do you make a question a high effort question when you know relatively little about a topic? Sometimes you're put in a situation where you don't really know the fundamentals. How do you navigate this landscape and ask questions of higher quality? I feel like the more that I learn about a certain topic, the better I get at at asking questions in this area. However, I don't really have a great framework on asking questions when I'm starting out in a new field, so what could one do in these cases?

Whenever I make a mistake that really upsets me, I send an email to myself about the mistake. By default, the email sits in my inbox for a week, after which I can archive it, but depending on how upset I am about the mistake, I might include in the subject "(2 weeks)", "(1 month)", "(3 months)". The whole point of this is because I don't like having emails in my inbox, I'm continually reminded of my mistake and will hopefully not repeat this in future.

A few people close to me have told me this seems like an unhealthy habit of negativity and that I am beating myself up too much.

For context, almost all the emails I send to myself involve chastizing myself for being too passive, e.g. "next time introduce myself to that exec/important person/girl at the gym, etc." I am naturally not assertive and would like to be a lot more confident and assertive, but am not sure if this is a system for getting there.

On the one hand, it is similar to journalling which is generally considered good. On the other hand, it works off of negative reinforcement. One idea is to just have all my mistakes in a separate doc, but I'm not forced to look at that doc the same way I am forced to look at my inbox. I guess I could have a habit of looking at that doc once a week. That might be the best solution.

Happy to hear anyone's thoughts.

I spend a lot of my free time working on personal projects, typically sourced from kodeko, the android developer site, and other & mobile developer blogs.

I often find that these projects are good experience, but not in depth enough to deploy. Are there any resources (or advice for creating ideas & development plans) anyone would recommend for building intermediate and advanced applications?

Hi! I have trouble what to do if I am in a team with detecting how to tell if the person is genuinely helping and not trying to babysit? To me it is hard to tell the difference, once in my previous company I assumed they helped me, so i always ask for help, but in the end my manager and my team member default reaction is to not letting me to work alone, this is so frustrating and it is hard for me to get into senior position and proud of my work. Now I am in my current company I strived for independence but my manager end up give me feedback that I should collaborate enough, but sometimes I feel that he never let me to work alone.

I read one of your article and I know that we suppose to collaborate and discuss, and I did discussion with some engineers and I can solve the problem, but my manager still says that. I have trouble to see what is the cause, in the end I want to be the person that is great to work with but not spoiled (babysitted everytime). If there are people who tried to babysit you, can you give suggestions on how to react politely, as I don't want to block collaboration and block myself at the same time? Thank you!

What's the right way to think about spending time on your job vs. spending time on side-projects? Once I finish enough work to meet expectations, should I then work on side-projects? Should I think of it more time-bound, and think of my job as the coding I do during the day, and then on my own time I only work on side-projects?

My thoughts are scattered here, but I know that side-projects are key to learning new tech, keeping yourself sharp, and enjoying coding more. On the other hand, linear thinking would say throw yourself entirely at your job, and ride that as high as you can.

Appreciate any insights on the matter.

I'm a completely self-taught software engineer aiming to get a full-time role as an Android engineer. I have no published apps in Google Play at the moment; I'm currently working on a metronome app as I am a musician.

What kind of fundamentals should I know to feel confident, specifically confident enough to apply to jobs? It’s hard for me to feel confident from a non-traditional Computer Science background. I keep doing more and more tutorials and courses to build up my confidence, and it just goes on and on. Is there some roadmap I can follow?