11–20 of 95 posts
For me it's a couple weeks of Arduino prototyping and some Python glue, but for them it's the world.
With every project, I'm always learning something new. I went from building projects with dozens of files to less than 10 and try to keep it to just a single page. I went from spending months on projects to spending no more than a month on a single project, sometimes taking up to just two weeks to complete. I think it's the lessons of sticking to the logic and getting straight to the point with programming. If there…
2) Dive into AI, learn how to do small scale LLM end-to-end experiments
3) Pick up my game experiment on Heirarchical Task Networks, based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
With every project, I'm always learning something new. I went from building projects with dozens of files to less than 10 and try to keep it to just a single page. I went from spending months on projects to spending no more than a month on a single project, sometimes taking up to just two weeks to complete. I think it's the lessons of sticking to the logic and getting straight to the point with programming. If there…
It gives you practice in mapping real world problems to code, by breaking the problems down into discrete chunks that can be independently implemented. It also teaches you how to design your code in a way that it can adapt easily to those real world problems changing over time. It teaches you where to abstract things out, where to be driven by configuration etc. It has to be driven by a real goal, not a made up one.
The other big thing, focus on readability over cleverness every time. Your code should feel easy to read even by YOU 3 months later. 6 months later. I’ve lost count at the number of times I cursed at my past self for writing some code where I thought I was being clever, but didn’t understand later. Mostly did that my younger years and then learned not to do that.
Ultimately I had a poor grasp of what scaling compute effectively looks like, but I feel much more useful when working with cloud resources due to better foundational understanding in that time. It all started with me putting too many services on one server, and everything webbed out from there.
I think it's going pretty well so far, has gotten me in the door at my last two jobs.
The stack includes Go, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc.
Not only have I been gaining software engineering skills, I am also learning aspects of business and growing a community.
I am doing this, of course, beside my client work and open source projects. And, fortunately, my client work tends to be interesting enough and provide opportunities for learning new stuff almost all the time.
I don't know if it is true for everyone or if I am phrasing this right, but keeping myself busy actually building something/anything helps the most (instead of just chasing whatever is new out there).