3 Simple Ways to Skyrocket Your Experience Without Looking for a New Job
In today’s issue, I want to show you how you can make the most out of your experience, mostly without looking for another job.
I cannot understate the importance of continuous learning and improvement. It is not only to satisfy your curiosity, but to build out your toolset as a developer.
As a side effect, you become more valuable to your team, company and on the job market in general.
Unfortunately, many developers just go about their day, working on tickets and adding code to the familiar places. Using the same methods and techniques over and over again.
Let’s put a stop to that.
We're going to use 3 simple techniques to broaden your experience so you can be way ahead of the number of actual years.
1. Depth
My first job was a fullstack developer in team of 2 developers inside a big organization.
We inherited the codebase from two very experienced developers who both left within a month.
In the beginning, we just followed whatever we were taught:
- Coding guidelines
- Test structure
- Deployment
After a while with a bit more confidence, we started to dig deeper.
As the project evolved, we started to poke around and update things, learning along the way.
By the end of the first year we
- completed a big frontend refactoring,
- fixed ever existing bugs in the deployment pipeline
- gained deep understanding into Ruby on Rails
Going deep is the easiest way to broaden your experience.
15-30 minutes a day won't kill your productivity, but over time will multiply your experience.
Possible ideas to go deep:
- Understand Git better
- Research one weird feature of your primary language or framework
Bonus: Keep a list of all things you learn as I mentioned here.
2. Breadth
When you go for breadth, you extend your knowledge and experience to areas that are not part of your day to day (yet).
At my previous place I was working a lot on the main code base.
I heard my team lead talking to another developer about a new project coming up.
This was supposed to be a small proof of concept project.
Turns out it opened a huge opportunity.
A year later, I ended up leading the team in charge of the same project we started.
Also this is how I learned Python.
Most projects nowadays use multiple technologies. Chances are that even within your own team there is something that you're not yet familiar with.
Start exploring them.
Possible ideas to go broad:
- Pair with team members on technologies that you're not familiar with
- Volunteer for small features that you're not yet know how to implement
3. Domain change
Changing the domains is an awesome way to gain more experience.
I like this technique because it allows to gain and transfer not only technical knowledge.
It allows you to see multiple use cases, approaches to problem solving.
Different domains may also have different quality standards, user expectations and development flows.
This kind of experience opens your horizons not only as a developer but on a personal level as well.
Over the years I've seen different domains:
- Appointment booking
- Project management
- Automotive dealerships
- Electric grid and balancing power
- Image optimization
- CDN technology
Most of the new experience came from switching jobs to a different domain, as I wrote in here.
But it doesn't have to be.
When you want to experience a domain change within your current role, you need to look for ways to work for another customer.
Example:
You're a frontend developer working on customer facing features of an e-commerce store.
You can ask to join the developer experience team (or initiative) where your main customers are your fellow developers.
Now from the domain of e-commerce you gained experience in DevX, understanding their pain points and requests better.
Other ideas change domain:
- Add process automation for your sales or QA team
- Build a small internal tool
That's it for today