| I have three modes when it comes to my career and skill development. - learning what I need to know about my specific job (institutional knowledge). Even if my title is “Senior Developer”, in reality I usually have a fair amount of architectural level responsibilities and meetings with C level of people working at small companies. For that, I ask a lot of questions and take notes with Evernote or if I take notes on paper, I take a picture. Evernote is surprisingly good translating my writing to text for searching. I keep a personal knowledge base so I can prepare for a meeting and be ready to answer questions. - If I am introducing a new to the company technology, process or framework, I have a list of links that fellow developers or my manager (who is technical) to review. - getting “interview ready”. About three months before I start seriously looking for a job,I freshen up on architectural subjects and make sure I can talk the talk. I keep a list of bookmarks and PDFs. Again, I am at a point in my career where no one asks me to do a whiteboard coding session but they do want to talk architecture. As an in the weeds developer, I know sound architecture but I don’t talk about it every day. - I have a list of topic areas that I need to study to feel in the gaps to really consider myself a “full stack developer/architect”. But I’m usually only focused on one thing at the time. But if I find an interesting “getting started” walk through about another topic that’s on my radar, I bookmark under a folder “Things to Learn”. Right now, that’s getting deeper into AWS, Docker, NodeJS, and React. |