if the learning curve flattens out, move to a different place which challenges you more abd perhaps has better more senior colleagues. ofc dont skip around jobs all the time, but if you wanna grow and there is no space to grow into it wont happen.
Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
171–180 of 305 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#172A practical tip for self-improvement: If you're using JetBrains IDEs, make it a habit to never commit code without reviewing and addressing the IDE's soft warnings and code improvement suggestions. This built-in static analysis can serve as a basic code review mechanism and help maintain code quality standards
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#173A practical tip for self-improvement: If you're using JetBrains IDEs, make it a habit to never commit code without reviewing and addressing the IDE's soft warnings and code improvement suggestions. This built-in static analysis can serve as a basic code review mechanism and help maintain code quality standards
This, but also learn to configure other linters, not only things bound to a specific IDE. Learn from the errors that linters raise, their documentation usually has a "rationale" section for each rule.
Ideally you should also run those linters in CI/CD. When a new member joins the team, they will get CI/CD linting for free, which will save you a ton time for each new team member
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#174Welcome to the messy real world! There are no "standards of the industry", do you don't need to meet the "highest" ones.
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#175> I barely interact with them
My first thought is... why? Have you tried reaching out to them to discuss what you're building? Maybe a shared chat channel (slack, teams, whatever) where you can discuss what you're doing; or even rubber duck and people can read as they want and offer their insights. Just because you're not on the same projects doesn't mean you can't talk about your work with each other.
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#176> But even then, I'm afraid I am not producing the software to the highest standards of the industry since we don't have any rigorous cross-checking, I wouldn't worry about this too much. As long as what you're doing seems to vaguely match whatever information about best practices you can find online, you're probably good. As long as you're not inventing your own security tech, using floating point values for financi…
> Reusing feature flags in a high frequency trading scenario
I think I read about this story
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#177You are in the perfect position for learning. You can do the real world job the way you want to without some senior arguing every step of the way. The company clearly trusts you and you FOMO? I'd say is FOFU (fear of fucking up). You are a few months in, you've seen nothing. Are you the kind of person that got thru school and college just by taking in classes or did you understand what you were doing?
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#178I was in a similar position for the first half of my career. 1) Start contributing heavily to a popular open source project you're familiar with and use. Try to make your PRs as high quality as possible. You'll get free code reviews from some of the best engineers in the world doing this. That'll be a million times better than ChatGPT code reviews and you'll be able to learn a ton from it while also getting your code…
Suggestion 1 is a great idea. In particular, consider contributing to one of Airflow’s provider packages if you use Airflow and have any steps in your data pipeline that aren’t ultra-specific to your company not covered by existing providers.
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#179I was in a similar position for the first half of my career. 1) Start contributing heavily to a popular open source project you're familiar with and use. Try to make your PRs as high quality as possible. You'll get free code reviews from some of the best engineers in the world doing this. That'll be a million times better than ChatGPT code reviews and you'll be able to learn a ton from it while also getting your code…
1) Is this really the case? I mean some of the popular open source project are kind of mature. So you would get some feedback, regarding some specifics of the frameworks. For sure you would learn a bit. On the other hand they are kind of "done" software, so you would not really learn how to build something new from scratch. Not sure about the other points.
'some of the popular open source projects are kind of mature', so find popular projects that aren't mature, or 'done'? There are countless.
I wouldn't say you'd only learn specifics of the frameworks. Maybe if you only submitted 2 or 3 PRs, but that's not what parent is suggesting: 'start contributing heavily'.
Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
#180Watch ThePrimeagen or Theo