I recently had someone ask me what I felt helped me grow the most in my first few years working as a software engineer. Upon them asking me this, I initially drafted an answer that looked something like the following: A combination of building systems and seeing how they failed and then reading lots of code and books including: (list of programming books I’ve read). However, upon writing this – and before sending it thankfully – I realized I was almost entirely misrepresenting the things that actually helped me grow. Building things and seeing how they broke was genuinely a huge factor, but, despite reading lots of programming books during my first few years as a software engineer, I think they played a relatively minor role in my growth (because books don’t work). Also, I (along with Kartik) wrote an entire post about how nobody actually reads code like a book, so clearly I wasn’t doing that much. Instead, I ended up writing a longer message which, in addition to building things, pointed to the following factors as encouraging my growth:
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