Thanks, Benjamin. And yep, I just started my writing journey and these Hashnode challenges are giving me the push to continue writing daily. :)

I started contributing to open source project a month ago and I am really enjoying it. In the last month, I have worked in more languages than I have in the last year. I wish I had done it sooner but I stayed stuck in the mentality that I needed to contribute to big projects. That's not the case at all. You made some excellent points about being involved early on in the project.

I feel disappointed whenever someone claims that you can learn Software Dev in 6 months and get a job. It's difficult to just cover one aspect of software development in 6 months let alone get a job. Great article on this topic and your additional guides will surely help a lot of people. :)

Great post, Kyle! I remember joining a company as an intermediate developer where everyone else was at Senior level. When I would be doing code reviews, my first action was to run it and check whether the functionality works and try to break it. This inspired the whole team put flags on PRs on whether it should be at least run and checked because I was catching a lot of bugs that would show up in running it. I think anyone can do good code reviews as long as they are diligent about it and in an open enough environment where they can ask why something is done in a specific way. PRs are a great way to learn the codebase and how everyone else writes code.

That's what I do too. I'm amazed at how fast it is to find solutions at the source. GitHub issues are great to find workarounds, possible things one might be doing wrong, or the issue might have been fixed in a later version and we just didn't update to it. I have also started scouring the original documentation whenever I hit an issue, they usually have common issues documented and how to solve them. I think these are really the next steps after Google in improving research and solution finding.

I have seen freelancers turn towards either creating their own products eventually so they don't exchange time for money or creating their own agencies and moving towards management. The allure of being able to work as much as you want/can and earn more money leads to a pretty rapid burnout, in my opinion.

I once said to a senior developer that I want to become so good that I don't have imposter syndrome. He leaned in a whispered to me that it never ends. I'm glad you took it as a learning opportunity and if you keep documenting your progress you will have something to look back on months and years later on how much you improve!

Really good topics. 📝 Going to participate in this. Good luck to everyone!

Great article, Eric! I firmly believe that good communication practice is often ignored even though it can make or break one's whole career.