Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech [Part 4] - The 2-Step Process

Networking doesn't have to be overly complicated and fuzzy. This lesson teaches you:

- A very basic 2-step framework to approach networking with
- The spectrum of help and providing value to people
- How much help you should provide to someone, especially prospective people you want in your network
- Why you should always give a non-zero amount of help in a work environment, especially if you work at a strong tech company

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 20] - Go Deeper: Follow Through

Congrats on making it to the end of the course! Here are additional resources to help you follow through with nailing your internship return offer:

- Take the code quality course: [Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer](https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/)
- Take the question asking course: [Ask Great Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly](https://www.jointaro.com/course/ask-great-questions-that-get-great-answers-quickly/)
- Take the onboarding course: [The Complete Onboarding Guide For Software Engineers](https://www.jointaro.com/course/the-complete-onboarding-guide-for-software-engineers-succeeding-when-youre-new/)
- To become a rockstar (Top 5%) intern: [Grow From Junior To Mid-Level Engineer: L3 To L4](https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-junior-to-mid-level-engineer-l3-to-l4/)

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 7] - Feedback Is Your Growth Fuel

Feedback is the most important growth tool for interns—and how you seek, receive, and apply it can define your success. Here are the core points from this lesson:

- Regularly ask for feedback (ideally weekly or biweekly), and be specific—ask what you should start, stop, or continue doing to improve
- Synchronous conversations (in-person or video) lead to deeper, more honest feedback than async messages—don’t rely only on Slack or email
- Always thank people for feedback, turn it into action items, and follow up to show progress—this builds trust and reinforces your coachability
- Make your improvements visible (e.g. call out test validation or coding pattern adherence in PRs) so your growth is legible to others
- Interns are evaluated heavily on growth rate (“slope”)—even if you start off behind, showing fast, consistent improvement is what earns return offers

SWE Internship Survival Guide [Part 1] - How This Course Works

Are the projects on your resume not helping you at all when it comes to impressing hiring managers and getting job opportunities? Let's fix that. Here are the core parts of the lesson:

- Your instructor [**Rahul Pandey**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpandey1234/) walks you through his extensive 10+ year Silicon Valley background with rapid career advancement, ending up as a high-performing Staff Engineer \[E6\]/Engineering Manager \[M1\] at Meta. Most importantly, he goes through how he's mentored interns at top companies like Pinterest and Meta
- Rahul breaks down his extensive personal internship journey featuring 4 (!!!) internships, ranging from a small startup (Shop It To Me) to a mid-sized company (Marin Software) to a historical giant (Walmart) to FAANG (Meta)
- We walk you through the course objectives. By the end of the course, you will understand:
  - ⛰️ Understand how internships work at top companies
  - 🧠 Establish the right mindset to succeed
  - ⚙️ Clarify technical skill expectations
  - 🗣️ Know the critical, underappreciated soft skills interns need
  - 💪 Generate a list of concrete action items to prepare and improve

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 18] - GitHub

95%+ of software engineers aren't getting nearly enough value from GitHub, which is a shame as they're already using it. This lesson teaches you:

- Why it's so easy to stand out on GitHub
- How GitHub is becoming more and more powerful as a traffic-driving mechanism
- How to quickly make an awesome README to greatly improve your repo's attractiveness
- What a terrible GitHub README looks like, explained with a fun example
- What great GitHub READMEs look like, explained with 2 examples
- The ingredients you should have for a compelling GitHub README

Here are the repos shared in the lesson:

- <https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta>
- <https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs>

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 17] - Social Media

Social media is incredibly powerful, but there's a harsh power law where 90%+ of users can't extract anything useful from it. This lesson teaches you:

- Why social media is the most inorganic way to get users, which is why you probably shouldn't do it
- 2 of the more powerful social media channels for sharing side projects in particular
- Tips for getting traffic through LinkedIn and why it's a great fit
- How to leverage Reddit effectively, explained with an in-depth example
- The new era way to build a successful product through community and when social media makes sense for you as a traffic acquisition mechanism

Here's how Alex succeeds on LinkedIn: [\[Case Study\] How I Get 500,000+ LinkedIn Post Views Per Week](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/tmSAAWJjLcLWqeGWOl4t/case-study-how-i-get-500000-linkedin-post-views-per-week/?playlistId=m62jZgEt7wpL1CC1OdHj)

If you're interested in the Reddit case study, here's the subreddit: <https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRaceTo10Million/>

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 14] - SEO

When it comes to getting traffic, a lot of it comes down to being in the good graces of a single FAANG company. This lesson teaches you:

- What SEO (search engine optimization) is
- The many ways you can waste your time with SEO
- An incredibly simple way to understand how to succeed at SEO
- The most straightforward, highest leverage way you can boost your SEO
- How to organically generate more web pages for your product, explained with an in-depth example

This is the only SEO tool you need: <https://search.google.com/search-console/about>

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 13] - Observe Your Users

If you're at this point in the course, you now deeply understand why feedback is great. However, the vast majority of users simply won't provide you with feedback. This lesson teaches you:

- How most end-users will behave with your side project (and any product really)
- What you should do proactively to extract signal from as many users as possible
- Important metrics to track when observing your users
- A great free tool you can use to see exactly how users are interfacing with your product

You can try PostHog here: <https://posthog.com/>

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 12] - 1 Star Reviews Are The Best

Everyone looks having good things said about them. However, this often isn't too useful when it comes to your side project. This lesson teaches you:

- Why negative reviews can be far more valuable than positive reviews a lot of the time
- The mindset you should have with negative reviews of your side project
- How responding to negative reviews properly can massively increase the reputation of your side project

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 11] - Be A Feedback Sponge

With a side project, you won't have complex analytics or brilliant product managers to craft the vision for it. This lesson teaches you:

- A simple mathematical model to understand how to take your side project from embarrassing MVP to rockstar product
- Why feedback is critical for your side project
- How to get more feedback on your side project
- The urgent, high-touch mindset you absolutely need to have with feedback

Ship & Grow 500k+ User Side Projects [Part 10] - Dogfooding

It's hard to get meaningful feedback to improve on your side project when it's just starting out. However, there is a way that you should really pursue as the developer. This lesson teaches you:

- The critical way for you to self-power leveling up your side project's quality
- Why dogfooding was an instrumental part of Facebook's and Instagram's success (and why it made the engineers better)
- Tips for dogfooding effectively and finding concrete ways to make your side project better

Ace The ML System Design Interview [Part 10] - Final Thoughts

Congrats on making it all the way to the end of this course! We've now covered the key elements to help you succeed in your machine learning system design interviews. Remember, having a structured approach is essential. Here are the core points from this lesson:

- Use a system to guide you through the interview, helping to avoid common pitfalls and ensuring key aspects of the problem are addressed
- Treat time estimates for each stage as a guide, but prioritize the core sections: big-picture system design, data, and modeling
- Communicate your approach to the interviewer at the beginning of the interview to set clear expectations
- Demonstrate structure and a systematic approach to impress interviewers and showcase engineering capabilities

If you like what Ilya has to say, subscribe to his YouTube for more high-quality ML/AI career guidance: [MLEpath - YouTube](https://go.mlepath.com/taro-youtube-mlepath)

If you want hands-on support from Ilya to crack the FAANG ML interview, join his coaching program: [MLEpath - Coaching Program](https://go.mlepath.com/taro-march-25)

Ace The ML System Design Interview [Part 1] - Introduction

We've created this course to help you navigate the machine learning system design interview, drawing from our extensive experience in big tech. Our goal is to demystify the process and provide you with the tools to succeed. Here's what you'll learn from this course:

- A structured approach to tackling complex machine learning system design interviews
- How to showcase your machine learning expertise, seniority, and communication skills beyond just designing a system
- Techniques for effectively communicating complex machine learning concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Strategies to evaluate trade-offs and analyze the pros and cons of different engineering techniques
- How to stay calm, focused, and confident throughout the interview process

If you like what Ilya has to say, subscribe to his YouTube for more high-quality ML/AI career guidance: [MLEpath - YouTube](https://go.mlepath.com/taro-youtube-mlepath)

If you want hands-on support from Ilya to crack the FAANG ML interview, join his coaching program: [MLEpath - Coaching Program](https://go.mlepath.com/taro-march-25)

Part 2 [RBP] Derive State When Possible

This lesson focuses on optimizing React state management for better performance and code organization.

- **Deriving State:** Learn how to calculate and derive state values directly within your component instead of storing redundant data, leading to more efficient and maintainable code.

- **Avoiding Unnecessary Re-renders:** Understand the impact of state changes on component re-renders and discover techniques to minimize them, such as using `useMemo` for expensive calculations.

- **Improving Code Clarity:** Explore how to simplify your state logic and reduce complexity by deriving state and avoiding unnecessary `useEffect` calls.

- Florian’s free web development playlist on YouTube: <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrnPJCHvNZuDG6BWjUFVxeWyYlve_SVJO>

- Code link: <https://github.com/codinginflow/react-best-practices/blob/derive-state/src/app/page.tsx>

Engineer Your Ideal Tech Career [Part 9] - Becoming A Founder

In this video, Sophie shares the advice that she often gives to people who want to explore becoming a founder from the perspective of being a founder herself. She then tactically explains what’s required as a founder, and ways to compensate if you don’t have (or are interested in) 100% of the necessary skills.

Looking for mentorship from tech’s top engineers + personalized job hunt assistance and interview prep? [Formation.dev](http://Formation.dev) can provide you unlimited career coaching, technical mentorship, personalized practice, and mock interviews. Join us here: <https://formation.dev/partners/taro>

Worksheet: [Formation - Coding Your Career](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/courses%2Fslides%2FFormation%20Career%20Direction%20Worksheet.pdf?alt=media&token=f6344b78-529a-411e-a449-7a34a8d55fc8)

Engineer Your Ideal Tech Career [Part 5] - Gathering Requirements And Preferences

As an introduction to this next section, you can expect to start defining what your long-term career and path may look like based on your preferences you defined in the last section.

For each dimension, pick one option only to make your goals as clear as possible. If one dimension doesn’t resonate with you, that’s okay! Skip it vs. making arbitrary goals.

The dimensions we’ll cover are:

- Role types
- Specializations
- Company stage
- Becoming a founder

Looking for mentorship from tech’s top engineers + personalized job hunt assistance and interview prep? [Formation.dev](http://Formation.dev) can provide you unlimited career coaching, technical mentorship, personalized practice, and mock interviews. Join us here: <https://formation.dev/partners/taro>

Worksheet: [Formation - Coding Your Career](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/courses%2Fslides%2FFormation%20Career%20Direction%20Worksheet.pdf?alt=media&token=f6344b78-529a-411e-a449-7a34a8d55fc8)

Get The Rating You Deserve [Part 2] - Why Performance Matters

**In this lesson, we'll explore the reasons why many talented individuals struggle to receive the recognition and rewards they deserve.**

- **Unfulfilled Potential:** We'll discuss the frustration and resentment that can arise when hard work and valuable contributions go unnoticed or unappreciated.
- **Bridging the Gap:** We'll delve into the factors that contribute to this gap between effort and reward, such as common misconceptions about impactful work and the role of mindset and strategy.
- **Empowering Action:** We'll provide actionable strategies and tactics to help you navigate these challenges and effectively convert your value into tangible rewards.
- **Personalized Approach:** We'll emphasize the importance of tailoring your approach to your specific goals and circumstances, whether it's a promotion, a raise, or simply greater recognition.

If you want to get personalized support from Yogi, you can reach out to him at [coaching@yogisharma.com](mailto:coaching@yogisharma.com) or schedule an introductory call to dive into your situation at <https://tinyurl.com/meetyogi>.

Come Up With 500k+ User Project Ideas [Part 14] - Your Superpower: Thinking Small

As a software engineer building things on the side, there is no chance that you'll take down Google. The good news is that you don't have to in order to achieve massive career benefits with side projects. This lesson teaches you:

- The massive advantage you have over Big Tech companies when it comes to the types of products you can build
- Why taking the more humble outcome with a lower success ceiling is much better for you tactically (and statistically) when it comes to building side projects

Come Up With 500k+ User Project Ideas [Part 4] - Finding Inspiration

Good side project ideas don't grow on trees, but finding them actually isn't that difficult. This lesson teaches you:

- The mentality you should have with your day-to-day life to organically stumble into great software product ideas
- How frustration in general is actually a blessing in disguise, not just for side projects but for engineering in general
- Tactical ways you can improve on existing products in your life

DSA Crash Course [Part 52] - Graph Warm Up Lecture

In this lecture, Alvin reviews how to implement a basic depth-first and breadth-first traversal on a graph.

If you need additional support taking these DSA skills and actually applying them, take [**Alvin's**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-zablan-b73a92117/) *complete* data structures and algorithms course on [**Structy**](https://structy.net/?utm_source=taro). You can try out the concepts yourself in their interactive code editor and learn advanced DSA patterns like stack exhaustive recursion.

Use [**this link to get 20% off**](https://structy.net/purchase?promo_code=taro20) the entire Structy DSA learning experience.

Follow Alvin on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-zablan-b73a92117/>

Tech Career Growth Videos

Our instructional videos provide software engineers with insights needed for career growth. Masterclasses go incredibly in-depth on a specific tech topic while case studies are real examples from established engineering leaders.