Learning Quickly Q&A and Videos

I'm looking for a good resources I can study from to strengthen my front end knowledge in react and type script. And may be built some projects to solidify the learnings. Would greatly appreciate any feedback/suggesstions.

Maybe try to limit to one recommendation to fuel the discussion

I'll kick it off.

The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali & Hasan Kubba

Audiobook: Yes (Audible)
Synopsis:

Like a video game character, each of us have innate advantages and disadvantages and this book is about how those can be leveraged to stick out from the competition or how your mindset can be shifted to flip what you think is just a disadvantage into a secret advantage!

I often see advice online / receive feedback from so many different sources. That could be during manager 1:1, peer feedback, reading content on LinkedIn, etc. While I resonate with it, I often find it hard to track all the feedback / advice I receive and holding myself accountable to act on it or change my behavior. This is especially hard when the advice is not immediately actionable (i.e. situation based).

So my question is, how can I consolidate the learnings from all of these sources and make sure I act on it (or at the very least, remember it when a situation arises)?

Hi Everyone,

I am a senior software engineer in my company. We are an R&D company who work for the retail industry. I work in the Computer Vision and systems area.

I joined this company as a senior software engineer. Initially, the project that I was hired for had C++ work but that project was scrapped and we worked on a new product where everything was Python and lots of DevOps tools.

Now the problem that I am facing is all my colleagues who are software engineers know a lot about Python and these tools. I have never used them so far. For me, it was exciting that I was using these new tools which were very necessary in the current industry but I was anyways slow and my code quality and the way I designed things never matched the team's ways of things. I know everybody says that the fundamental principles are the same but I found there are some pythonic ways which are way better than a person who is learning it. Additionally, I was a Senior Engineer, so the manager and lead always came to me and said that they expected more from me. I was not contributing enough.

I feel it is normal to expect things from me as I am a senior. The main problem that I face is I don't feel myself important to the team. Most of the development or coding is done by the rest of the team. I even see they are given more design and senior role work too. I am given very small things. Honestly, even I don't know if I will be able to work on designing systems using these technologies. It affects my confidence and so I am never confident in my work, I have a constant fear that I can lose my job anytime. I don't feel proud of my work anymore now. I have learnt the new tools from last 1 year but I am unable to lead the team in any direction. There are some new concepts in Computer Vision world now like Embeddings which is completely new to me I am struggling to catch up on anything.

Our product is going live very soon, so the issues and pressure have started to grow. I am not even able to build any relationships with the real stakeholders in the team. They all love my other teammates and thus keep giving them work. Whenever I try to talk to them about any issues I do not get any encouraging reply, it feels like I am giving very basic suggestions.

Can anyone advise me on how to handle and perform well in the team and above all feel recognized in the team and organization? I am pretty sure many people here would have changed technology and should have faced similar situations , many would have recovered from this situation.

I always have very high standards for myself and have always been recognized as so in my previous companies. Lately, I feel I am not feeling very proud about my work, and I feel that is the main issue. I need some advice to improve in my field and in a consistent way.

I've been in the IT industry for 3 years, working on various projects. For the past 1.5 years, I've been heavily involved in Python projects, mainly as a back-end developer using Django. My tasks typically revolved around building or updating APIs as per specific requirements.

Most of these projects were already underway when I joined, so I mostly inherited tasks based on existing project needs. As a result, I wasn't part of the initial database design or project structuring.

Now, I'm starting on my personal project using Django. However, I lack experience in structuring and designing a project from scratch, especially in organizing apps and defining models.

I took a look at other frameworks like Spring Boot and noticed they don't offer the same level of "batteries included" features as Django.

I'm currently dealing with two main challenges:

1. Impact of Learning Django First: I'm concerned that focusing solely on Django might limit my overall understanding of back-end development. Django's comprehensive built-in features might not be present in other frameworks, and that worries me.
2. Project Design and Structure: I'm puzzled about the best practices for structuring and designing a Django project, especially regarding app organization and model structuring.

I'm seeking advice on overcoming these issues and figuring out how to structure my project effectively. I'm also contemplating whether sticking with Django could potentially narrow my overall grasp of back-end development because of its extensive in-built functionalities.

Also, I applied to some companies and most of them are asking for experience in Java back-end development.

Hi all, what are some of the book recommendations for career growth at tech companies..

1. early grad

2. 2 years experience at FAANG companies

3. Engineers at the age of 50+

Thanks!

• I can use chat-gpt/claude to understand small code-snippets. But I'm not sure how to use it to understand the whole code structure. Are there any IDE plugins that worked for you for this purpose?
• Especially in streaming/online model service, I can't add print statements to debug. I can only look at tensorboard which isn't helpful in understanding the code-base. How can you better understand with ML models in this scenario?

How would you spend you first 30 days to achieve the an impactful start (ideally from a staff perspective):

• What would you prioritize?
• What questions would you ask?
• When given your first tasks, what additional/beyond scope extras would you consider?
• What would you be mindful of NOT to do?
• How would you start prepping to figure out what to become an SME in?

As I watch , I see the slide where it mentioned MVP and just 1 Thing. And also, in the slide, the example of the app is . I have couple questions about this.

1. To come up with the idea of Just 1 Thing application, I believe most of the ideas are already executed before. Is that something I do have to afraid of or not? When I search on app store now, I see similar apps to Random Name Picker. And I'm afraid for how we grow the number of users as most of users choose to use something existing with top rated.
2. If we take number 1 question as a factor (most of users choose to use something existing), how to come up with the idea about something that someone has not executed before?

I want to build on side projects by myself but to come up with something specific with quality. I'm thinking about to do system design doc (define specific requirement, breaking the big task to small task (make it granular, etc)). Try to make a plan before make any execution.

Please let me know if this plan works for me or not. I want to execute on how I can serve something to users that we all think it's useful.

This question always stresses me because I'm a backend Python developer and the stuff I could learn is a lot that I end up studying/practicing nothing.

I use in my day to day: Python, Flask Docker, and Oracle. I don't know what else I could study or if I need to get better at these technologies.

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

So i'm a entry level engineer and was reading some post on twitter about getting deeper in CS to be taken seriously. The post mentioned learning a lower level language and I always wanted to learn C++. But when i asked my friend who is senior that then went on to become a CTO at his own company he told me I should learn java since it's low enough that a lot of systems are built on it which in return means more jobs. When I looked at job listings for both languages there were fairly the same amount of job postings but he's saying it would be easier to get in entry level with java and that C++ is more for mid and higher levels. also i always wanted to learn C++ because i saw that with python is mainly used at hedge funds which eventually in my career i always wanted to join one, so which one should I choose? And please make a choice for me lol and not respond with "whatever you feel like doing", because i'm kinda indecisive with this choice.

Git/version control is an important skill for people in tech. What are some ways to get good at it? It's often easy to do things in a hacky way when there is a git command that does exactly what you want to do that will save you a lot of time in the long run. Also, understanding the fundamentals of how Git works can go a long way.

What are some good tips? Other than , of course :)

Hi community,

I am a recently joined M/L engineer at Meta and working in ads domain. I am stuck for last few weeks in verifying a change. Essentially, it involves multiple systems built, request routing and looking for the expected changes. Tried reaching out to T/Ls and internal users. Even politely asked team / outside to ramp me up in the domain but nobody responded positively. They all give me pointers to some internal documentation or workplace group to ask questions. I feel I am really stuck. I have regular updates meeting on Monday.

Here's 2 things about how the updates work:

1. I am making some progress everyday but things are moving very slow which is making me frustrated.
2. When sharing updates, everybody shares the impact and good followups where I only share one incremental step like looked at the logging, traffic is low so can't determine the magnitude of the change.

Anyone willing to share their experiences?

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.?

I'm a Staff Engineer in the satellite telecommunications industry where I am responsible for the strategic success of the software products in my department. My organizational responsibilities and weekly calendar align almost perfectly with the . I'm sure that it will come as a surprise to no one that getting to this point in my career was an intense and conscientious journey. I am self-taught, I fell in love with programming as a child, and I have never attended a University. Things are not even close to perfect, but I am happy with my career so far.

My day-to-day work does not involve much programming, but I spend the vast majority of my time communicating with Tech Leads, Scrum Masters, PMs, TPMs, EMs, etc. to coordinate and accomplish different tasks. The rest of my time is split between communicating and aligning with high-level product stakeholders, such as my boss, and mentoring engineers. When I do code, it is because there is some experiment I want to run, i.e., I might create a prototype of a new product or feature that could massively impact a departmental OKR.

Outside of my day-to-day work, I dedicate as much time as I can to learning and practicing new technical (programming, cloud), professional (LinkedIn Learning), and domain-specific (satellites, AI) skills. I also consume a lot of content here on Taro and I often participate in company and community programs that I believe in (change maker programs, diversity and inclusion programs, etc. as a participant or as a coach).

I would love to have input on this aspect of my career as a Staff Engineer who would like to be a Fellow one day. As I make progress in my career, I find that (obviously) the expectations others have of me, in regard to being at the forefront of technology and really knowing what I am talking about in domain-specific (science-heavy, business-heavy) topics, have grown exponentially. I've already adapted my approach to developing domain-specific skills, for instance, instead of relying solely on MOOCs, I also now have regular sessions with domain experts (business folks with advanced industry-relevant university degrees), something my boss encourages and expects me to continue to do. I have now also considered the prospect of going to university myself, something my employer would sponsor.

So the question is, how can I best invest my personal development time so that as I progress in my career I can continue to meet, or even surpass, exponentially growing expectations?

I'm sure someone will have a great idea of how to approach this challenge. Also, there is a quote I appreciate from Alex Chiou that gives me hope that I can do it.

It wasn't due to natural talent or anything - I'm honestly not that smart.

With learning other languages do you go straight into building or you have to learn some stuff first? I saw a video and the guy was like he just used Go getting started and just built as he go and learned way more from that than a tutorial. Cause there’s a CLI tool I wanna make with Go but I’m tired of the tutorial I just wanna build.

I recently got an offer for a Senior Java developer. While the interview rounds were mostly language agnostic, I know the basics of Java and can debug a Java program quite easily.

Not sure how much of the language depth should be adequate for a senior engineer. I've been a C++ engineer for sometime now.

How do I learn Java fast and efficiently? I'm aware that most of the learning will occur in the job itself, but I want the onboarding (a week away) to be as smooth as possible.

In July, I received a mid-year evaluation indicating room for improvement, with a rating of 2 out of 5 on the scale. My goal is to achieve an outstanding rating by this time next year. Here are the areas my manager provided feedback on for improvement:

He is a college hire, so he is a very junior developer.  He is an enthusiastic member of the team and seems eager to make contributions. He has struggled to learn the fundamental skills required for the job (programming, database, web development).  He will need to improve upon these skills in order to make contributions to the team with little assistance from his peers.

• Company is doing an AWS migration (with lambdas). We're moving away from old IBM architecture.
  • Goal is to move away from SOAP service to build scalable REST API.
• I have limited working experience with AWS but never touched Terraform or have needed to do any migration work at all.
• We'll be building out lambdas and transferring traffic over to our new service
• Team is also new to NodeJS (with the exception of some new folks i.e. me and some other people)

Any recommendations on how to best succeed given the current context?

• General recommendations for succeeding in this ambiguous domain?

• Resource recommendations?

Thinking of skimming AWS docs / AWS course to quickly learn basics but planning on spending most of my time on implementing lambdas with mock data -- goal is to share POCs with team and iterate on feedback before sharing our new service with stakeholders.