4 Tips to Keep Improving Skills After Getting a Developer Job

You just landed your developer job, congratulations!

Before getting hired, you had a plan to enhance your skills and secure the job. Now that you're employed, how do you keep improving your skills?

Here are four tips to continue improving and growing in your role.

1. Build something

Maybe there's an app or a website that you wanted to build for a long time.

Make this a side project.

If you can, set aside some time to work on it every day.

Maybe you'll feel that you're not accomplishing much on any given day, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

After a few weeks or months, you'll see your product coming to life, and this is extremely satisfying.

Choose a project that challenges you, but is not too far above your skill level. As you build your confidence, you can go bigger and tackle more complex projects.

You only improve when you keep challenging yourself. Keep building new and different things.

2. Learn to read other people's code

Chances are that throughout your career you'll spend more time reading code than writing it.

Getting good at reading code will help you to understand many different codebases.

Where can you do this?

• Read the documentation and source code for libraries or frameworks you already use.
• Find some popular open-source projects on GitHub. Once you find a good project, check out the code, and open it in your editor. Then try to run it and understand how it works.
• If you work in a team, do code reviews.

As you do this, try to think about how the code could be improved.

Doing this will make you more aware of style and conventions so that you can improve the way you write your code.

Your future self will thank you for this.

3. Get involved in Open Source

By contributing to existing open-source projects, you can improve your code-reading skills, and get valuable feedback on your own code.

To get started, you can join the GitHub open-source community, which contains many useful resources.

By writing open-source code, you can stop reinventing the wheel and carry over your best code across projects. And if your project is useful enough, it can have a big impact.

Doing this is also great for your resume. A good GitHub profile shows tangible proof of your skills and coding style and increases your chances of getting a better job.

4. Share your knowledge

When you learn something useful, blog about it. Explaining things in writing can improve your knowledge of a certain topic.

Practice making your writing more clear and concise. This is a valuable skill in itself - especially if you need to communicate with different stakeholders.

Keep writing, and you'll build a trove of knowledge that you can share with others, and come back to when you need.

This will also boost your profile and CV, and help you engage with your community.