[prepend]

What seemed to help me was learning how to test things so I didn’t break the build.

This helped me because I had to learn requirements, talk with people, understand dependencies, and not make people’s life harder. And I had sort of a value to smart seniors as I would maintain stuff that was hairy to change and not break it.

I also spent a lot of time on nights and weekends volunteering with the network people and hardware people and firewall people to understand how those components fit into the architecture.