This post won’t be about how to improve your career as some people know more about this than me. This post won’t be about giving you the list of classes/books you should read. This won’t be about pushing to develop a real concrete project outside of work.

There was a time when I had no drive to do anything outside of work because I was hoping that what I was doing was enough. The truth is I was not behaving to the standard required to reach my goals.

When I plateaued in the back-end, let’s say 4 years ago I decided to switch things up because I couldn’t see a way for me to get better.

Going into the front, I added new aspects to my game: systematically looking for a class/book that I could use to improve my decision-making on a day-to-day basis, working fewer hours in favour of training and basing myself more on ‘abstraction validated by data’ rather than ‘abstraction hopefully validated by data’. It was a real success because, in the end, I ended up being a manager.

To me reaching the next level is correlated to the most fundamental aspect of Software Engineering which is about making decisions and knowing their implications on the system. For your own sake, you should know your users, why they are using the tools but also the overall architecture of your system and how each one of those components is working.

It went from understanding the mental model to use when coding React applications, to understanding how Javascript is executed at runtime to how to create a type system which allowed us to create React components that generate whole pages based on the type of data expected.

This requires a level of commitment which is quite high but highly rewarding as you manage to piece things together little by little. Create your system, sometimes it might involve more training than working or the other way around it is up to you to figure it out. It should be flexible enough to cater for the demands of real life but at the same time should give you more and more mental models to help you make better decisions and be less afraid to ship better quality things regularly.