3 ways to excel as a Software Engineer in 2024
The world of software development is a pretty great one, but with increasingly more supply than demand, how can you excel as a software engineer in 2024?
Diversify your work
As wonderful as it would be, working as a software engineer doesn’t always mean working on code all day, every day. There is much more to the role, and the more you can diversify yourself within this role, the more resilient and marketable you’ll be as a software engineer.
For example, one way to add tools to your programming belt is to write technical articles. These articles could be about things you’ve learned while working on certain features or bugs, new or upcoming features of a programming language that you use at work, or tutorials for certain frameworks or software.
Actively trying to explain a topic forces you to really understand it as opposed to ‘passively’ watching tutorials and not really taking in the information.
By writing these articles, not only are you deepening your own knowledge of these topics, you are also creating a tangible library of resources that you can use as evidence to showcase your knowledge and skills, whether this be to potential employers or when negotiating your next salary. You’re also building up resources for your company, which benefits everyone.
If writing isn’t your ‘thing’ then you could showcase these skills and knowledge via presentations, which we’ll go further into in the next section.
Having diversity in your work is really helpful when you’re feeling ‘burned-out’ from working on code. Not only does it give your brain something else to focus on, it also helps to develop other ‘soft’ skills that will make you an overall better developer, employee, and more valuable asset to the programming world.
In this way, you’re able to contribute, even if it’s not directly code related. The bonus being that you create and share content both internally and externally, which leads us nicely into the next section…
Showcase your skills
Within your company, you can showcase your skills through developer exchanges. These could be smaller or larger group meetings that occur once or twice a month, where developers exchange knowledge with each other.
By participating in such exchanges, not only will you develop technical knowledge and presentation skills, but you’ll also gain more visibility within your company. This visibility may lead you to other company projects where you can further utilise and expand your tech stack.
I also use these developer exchanges to learn about new topics. I usually decide on a topic that I want to learn more about and then sign up to share this knowledge within the exchange the following month.
This way, I put ‘healthy pressure’ on myself to learn enough about the topic that I can explain and discuss it with other developers. Again, this leads nicely into the next section…
Sharpen your programming skills
The articles, presentations, and exchanges are great for developing your knowledge of certain topics. The next step is to use this knowledge to do what software engineers were born to do *puts on sunglasses* — code.
Working on a small, independent project that utilises the language/tools/framework you’ve been learning is the perfect way to really sharpen these skills.
Before starting on a project, be sure to decide on one that you genuinely find interesting, and one which will be useful for you or the company.
(…how many times have we started a new project and then left it to die the following week…?)
This will also provide another opportunity for you to showcase your skills to your colleagues, by talking them through your project, the code, and how it works. It will also allow you to practice dormant skills while developing new ones.
You can also showcase this project externally (e.g. via GitHub) and gain even more visibility in the programming world. This will increase your marketability further, and can also help to expand your network and reach.
