Leveling up tips from Chelsea Troy

Dear new developer,

I found this video from Chelsea Troy about how to level up as a developer interesting (I love watching YouTube videos on 1.5x speed to save time):

A few tidbits I found interesting:

• the distinction between leveling up passively (which we all do as we learn in our daily work life) and leveling up actively (with a goal)
• the importance of routine in this deliberate leveling up process
• the idea of commit tracing as a way to learn a system (yes, version control is important)

You can also read the transcript.

This section about reaching out to experts also resonated. If you take the time to craft a good question, you can get the attention and help of even busy people.

Third, if I am struggling to find the answers to my questions in literature, I find myself asking, who can help me? I think it’s easy, especially in tech, to feel like you’re alone and you need to be able to solve problems yourself. But I have found that not to be true. Sometimes it’s a matter of reaching out to a coworker or colleague to get another set of eyes on whatever I’m working on. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll ask an expert. And I have been repeatedly surprised by the generosity of experts. The first time I ever needed to implement Spring Batch in something, we had a complicated use case and I somehow just couldn’t get it to go. So I reached out to the team, and one of the Spring core contributors pair programmed with me to get the thing working. Another time, I was working with XGBoost, which is a machine learning library that relies on a particular, custom-crafted data structure called a DMatrix. But I couldn’t find anything online about how the data structure was built, so I reached out to a developer advocate on LinkedIn, and she gave me an insightful answer.

I’m not saying her system will work for you wholesale. Whenever you’re learning what worked for someone else, you want to evaluate the methodology from your perspective. But she definitely has great ideas (she blogs on leveling up a fair bit) and I’d suggest you listen and try out the ones that excite or interest you.

Sincerely,

Dan