How To Grow As A Software Developer

Key Takeaways

[Music] how's it going everyone my name is daniel and today we're going to be talking about how to continuously grow how to stay motivated throughout your software development or software engineering career so if you haven't seen me before my name again is daniel and i'm from the channel aws simplified and my channel is devoted to helping you become a better developer so i have all sorts of videos on topics like this where i give kind of personal tips based on my career uh also technical videos around cloud concepts cloud computing uh software design principles and some hands-on tutorials that are very similar to what's on this channel so if you're interested in that go and check it out down in the description section below and before i get into the content i just want to take a special thank you to traversey media for allowing me to be a guest creator on this channel i've actually been a huge fan of this channel for probably going on five years now and it was actually one of the key motivating factors the key motivating elements that helped me decide that i wanted to start my own channel uh so again thank you for allowing me to be here and talk to you today so first of all who am i what makes me qualified to even answer this question so i've been in software development software engineering for the past eight years i've been a professional software engineer where i've jumped around from company to company as of today i've been in the same role for the past i think four and a half years now coming on on five and what i find is that a lot of developers even the ones that are just getting started some that are even more further along in their career tend to flatline in terms of career progression flatline in terms of motivation and inspiration and the tips that i want to share with you today are how to overcome that so that you continuously grow and i think like some of these tips will also apply for those of you that are just also getting started in your career so what are these practical tips like what what are things that you can do and i'm also going to share some practical examples from where i've applied these very tips uh to my real life um so when i was trying to establish like how do you stay motivated like this was really a difficult thing for me because as i was at my career or as i was at my position rather for you know several years i started to get comfortable in doing what i was doing and i was kind of having difficulty um staying motivated and progressing and feeling like my career was progressing in any meaningful way and so what i realized was that i needed some kind of actionable goal to work towards it wasn't enough to say oh yeah i'm going to work on this project and it's going to get me to the next step i need to have an objective in mind so that i can work towards that so a practical tip and what i realized and what i ended up doing in my career was every team every uh or at least most teams should have some concept of a task board often called like um a sauna board or kind of a sprint board if you're in an agile environment and so what i realized was that i had this tendency to pick tasks that i knew i couldn't achieve so pick tasks that i knew that were reasonable for me that i already had some kind of background in and i would kind of leave the tasks that were more complicated for someone else to pick up and and what i realized over time was that the tasks that i was performing although i was accomplishing them and i was making some progression i wasn't really learning a lot um so this comes to my first this may seem like an obvious tip but put yourself outside of your comfort zone and there's so many ways that this can apply um and in this specific example it applies in the sense that pick up tasks that normally you may have had some self-doubt or maybe some hesitation because you don't really know the topic very well but my suggestion for you is put yourself outside your comfort zone pick up those tasks that other folks may be less inclined to pick up and um what i find is that when you pick up these tasks you put yourself in a position kind of a vulnerable position where you need to exercise your resourcefulness to figure out how something works and then also solve the objective in mind so this goes back into like my opinion of like what is university what is coding camp and what does like colleges teach us well obviously it teaches us some technical abilities like the skills that you would need in some kind of position but it also teaches us how to learn and i think this is one of the most if not the most underrated aspect of just your career development learning how to learn is such an important skill and the way that you can kind of exercise this muscle so that you get better at this one very practical application is just to take tasks that normally you wouldn't have taken tasks that are in a domain that are uncomfortable to you and there's a ton of resources out there there's the internet there's stack overflow there's youtube channels there's mentors there's your colleagues and i think it's it's totally okay to take on a task or take on a responsibility where you don't necessarily know the ropes where you're kind of uncertain of yourself but i assure you that once you take on that task and you come out on the other end and you accomplish it you'll feel like you've grown a lot more and that's the point i really want to hit home here is that if you put yourself in the position where you're unsure of yourself then i think you'll really come out at the end of the day as learning a lot more and staying motivated to learn more because you really get to flex those muscles of again learning how to learn so that's a practical tip that you can do on your day to day to kind of just improve yourself in small chunks and you can kind of take this at your own pace this doesn't mean that you need to take up brand new tasks that you're unfamiliar with all the time maybe you want to phase this in a little bit but it's a very practical way that i've used in my career and as an example for instance there was a task i recall a few years ago it had to do with implementing a distributed caching client and i had no idea how to do this i knew very little about caching and if you can actually check out my videos now i have very in-depth videos on how caching works so clearly you can see i came out of this task and now i'm very comfortable with this topic and so what i'm trying to emphasize here is that initially i knew nothing about this but i used the resources that were available to me i flexed that muscle of learning how to learn and now if you throw me into any task i'm confident in my abilities to just take something that i have no idea about or very little context i am now confident in my ability to take that on and figure it out and this is such a valuable skill for software developers more often than not you're going to find yourself in a position where you have no idea how something works but your job the reason that you are hired is because you can figure it out right that learning how to learn that's a very important skill and you need to find all the opportunities that you can to exercise that and continue to learn so that's the first practical tip so the second practical tip um is more for people that may be further along in their career that kind of want to push it to the next level and this is a very important topic for me because i'm going to share with you an experience of how i applied this so for those of you that are looking to kind of get to the next level in terms of growth or continuing to learn what i find that in most organizations it just it's a matter of taking on a task that has a lot more responsibility so typically a project task um and what what i think you'll find there is that when you you get put into those kinds of positions especially if you've never been up and been put in a position like that before you'll find that you'll come out so far ahead because you're exposed to such different ways of thinking you're exposed to talking to different folks and looking at things from different angles so you get to wear many different hats that allow you to kind of see the business see the problem from a very different perspective so the tip here is to take on additional responsibility take on larger projects even if it's something that you're not really certain that you're going to be able to do um so i want to share with you a perfect example of this something that personally happened to me me in my career and this was i think two or three years ago so two or three years ago i was on a team and it was a newer team i was reporting to a new manager and my manager had come up to me and said hey daniel are you interested in this topic we have this big project coming up and it's going to have a high visibility there's a lot of important people that are going to be watching on the progress of this project are you interested in taking this on and like i knew that this was kind of a make it or break a kind of decision that i need to make so i told him that like i need to go think about this like it's not something that you can make just off the cuff in terms of a decision so i went home that night and did a little bit of self-reflection on myself and i thought you know this is something this is a project that initially i feel very uncomfortable with i'm a hundred percent outside of my comfort zone um there is a risk of failure here like it's very possible that i can take this on and totally screw it up and it could look bad right like this is a fear obviously no one wants to feel embarrassed no one wants to feel stupid but you also want to kind of be progressing in your career right so i thought to myself like okay sure there's this risk of failure sure there's this risk of embarrassing myself but i decided to borrow a concept that uh the first place i heard this was from jeff bezos and the concept is called or the framework is called the cost minimization framework the cost minimization framework uh the first time i heard it again was from jeff bezos but i'm sure it's from somewhere else and the basic idea of this framework is that when i look back on my life and when you look back on your life i want to regret the fewest number of things i want to look back and say i'm glad i took that chance i'm glad i took that risk right and what i realized when i was deliberating reflecting over whether or not i wanted to take this project on was that if i if i choose not to say i'm like okay i'm too scared or i come up with some rational reason irrational logic as to why i shouldn't do this what would happen well i would regret that for the rest of my life and not only would i regret taking on that potential opportunity i was also going to be watching someone else that was going to be taking that responsibility so someone else would be filling my shoes and i would be watching them like i work in the same area he would just my manager would just have found someone else someone more responsible or someone more willing to take on this project so not only would i regret not doing it myself but i would watch someone else kind of as a shadow of what i could have been if i were the one to take on that project and so the eventual realization that i came to was that if i didn't do this i would regret this too much and the potential benefit that i would get in terms of personal growth and personal development far outweighed the negatives in terms of potential embarrassment in terms of uncertainty and unknown in terms of other risk factors that i couldn't even think of at the time um so i decided that like for sure it made sense for me to take on this project and once i did fast forward like maybe six to eight months after it really started to kick off um after all was said and done i i grew so so much when i'm looking at this in retrospect um i look at who i was before and i look at who i am now and i've developed so many different skills that i can think of off the top of my head and i'm sure there's many many more skills such as honing my ability to communicate skills such as talking to senior leaders people that i i normally never would have communicated with skills like putting on a different hat so putting on the hat from the business perspective or from the technical project management perspective exercising my ability to design solutions exercising my ability to write cohesive extensible code so i look back on this now and although i was scared at the time and there was a whole lot of uncertainty between the start and the end but what i find is that i learned so so much i grew i developed and what the lesson that i want to give you here is that jump off the diving board go into that you know that element of the unknown right and and i think what you'll find is that initially you'll be very scared and you may feel very uneasy but what you'll find is that you have the abilities you have the resources you have the support mechanisms to get you through anything stack overflow is a great place youtube is a great place your colleagues are always there to support you nobody wants you to fail and of course we don't want to fail but i think when you kind of put yourself in these positions you are forcing yourself it's a forcing function to you for you to improve and for you to continue growing as a developer throughout your career and just to kind of close out this story a little bit uh again as i mentioned i end up growing so so much it's done wonders for my career and for my personal development and i'm so so so glad that i took on this project because i grew not only as a developer but as a person as well so hopefully this video has been useful again my name is daniel and i'm from aws simplified if you like this video go and check out my channel down below maybe you can subscribe or like some of my videos and i will see you next time