Software Engineer. What to learn or practice after graduation?
By: Yuriy Berezskyy
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Coding, Software Engineering, Programming

Hello everyone. I hope you are doing great and have wonderful time these days. I know some of you have just graduated or just want to find some more good information what to do next or just a new idea… Anyway, you will find something for yourself. After graduation you can feel different emotions(good and bad), you can be lost in your tech path and you can still feel sad that you don’t know something. I would like to tell you that’s alright. Everyday you have challenges, we have to move forward to our goals and dreams and they always are bittersweet. One day you can feel you know everything, on the another day you understand that it was just small part of a huge universe of knowledge. It’s alright. Unfortunately, we can’t have all knowledge just in one day. Just small steps will bring you to success. I have collected all good experiences from different people who are working right now in different companies and also included my own. So, what the next step?

1. Learn new technology(coding language) or keep coding on what you know?

I guess this is one of the most important questions that you might have. Certainly, it depends how do you feel about knowing the language. Okay, just ask truly yourself if you ready to right full app by yourself on this on technology? If yes, I would recommend you just still practicing and develop a new skills in this technology, to make it an ideal. Don’t rush yourself to learn everything(If you know React you can also learn how deploy your project, learn something new about graphs, how to do better styling in your projects). If the answer is no, I would honestly suggest you to go through one more course online and build very small projects by your own again. For example, you studied at bootcamp or college JavaScript, React and Ruby on Rails and you still want to become as a Software Engineer, to my point of you, if you don’t understand JavaScript and React or Ruby. It’s not because you are bad student that you don’t understand. Maybe for you, teacher didn’t explain in that way that you would understand. Everything was super fast that you couldn’t understand in the first time. Just go to Udemy.com they have a tons of information and nice courses. You can buy with discount for 10$-15$ a good course from that will explain you everything from the beginning and to the end. Remember, if you want to have a good teacher and good courses you have to pay. Of course, you can find some information on Youtube or just read tutorials from official websites of technologies. To my opinion, it’s also good practice when you follow someone’s instructions and step by step in monkey way you write code with a person who knows. After all, you will understand more things then you can write by your own sometimes. There are a lot of more sources like Coursera, Codeacademy, …

2. Learn algorithms and data structures.

I know a lot of people hate them, but we have to know the logic how everything works in coding and of course the second or third interview when you are applying for a job, definitely will start with some logical tasks. So for my recommendation, just one algorithm per day will help you with a future interview and also you improve your skills in your language. IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT. There are some good resources: Geeksforgeeks, Udemy. Also to practice more HackerRank.

3. Write your whole project by yourself?

Exactly, people want to see your knowledge after you learned something. People want to see the results. And the result will be your project. Even a small one. It’s hard and it is a lot for beginner software engineer. We are demanded to do more things day by day. The world is growing fast so that we have do the same. Create a new project, write in your new or favorite language, push to your Github every time you did something new. People who are interested in you will check your Github and they will see what you have done and what you didn’t. If you never worked on Github, I insist on learning that, if you are still not good in it. Learn how to deploy your own projects with Github Pages, Firebase or Heroku. Write your own portfolio and show to everybody what you did.

4.How to get work experience or how to feel work in team?

Well there are a lot of good ideas. First of all, find some people who can be with you during your first experience. Find someone who will be happy to work with you on the same project. You can have your own idea and implement this idea in real world. After that you can participate in hackathons and find someone who will be happy to give money for growing your idea. You never know. But other side is to participate in different open source projects(volunteering jobs). I understand that it’s for free, but you will understand what to be a part of the team. Also from the tech side, you will understand others programmers code and add your own one.

To sum up everything, you are boss of your future. Nobody knows what is better for you, but I am happy to share with you some experience that I have. Meet more people, read more information everywhere and try everything that you are passion about.