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Discussion on: Going from Intermediate to Advanced Coding Skills: Changing the way I'm learning to code

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brburzon profile image
Brandon Burzon

For me, I observed that there are not a ton of difference between the coding skills of an intermediate (SDE II) and advance (SDE III) level engineer at my company. The main difference I see is their ability to solve problems and the impact it has on the team, org, or the whole company.

I would say once you have a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals of the language, framework, or ecosystem where you are trying to get good at, start trying to improve and practicing your problem-solving skills.

One way I do this is by reading research papers and sometimes blogs on my commute.

Here are the reasons why:

  1. Problem-solving - when there is a specific problem I am trying to solve at work such as looking for a fast hashing algorithm, usually someone has already researched about them and written their results.
  2. Context - sometimes I have to work on projects that I have 0 experience in, and reading papers is a good way to increase my familiarity to current best practices which allows me to think bigger when I am designing a solution than if I started without any background on the topic.
  3. Curiosity - some topic are just interesting in general even though they are completely unrelated from what I actually do for work. This is useful because some solutions to problems from other area or fields can be reapplied to my work. For example, it was interesting to see the similarities between microservices and IoT! Some best practices such as circuit breaker pattern are even applicable to both.

Hope this helps and wish you all the best!

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daveskull81 profile image
dAVE Inden

I agree, problem solving skills will take someone very far in learning to code. That skill can be more important than knowing the syntax of a language. I like the idea of reading detailed papers on related topics that aren't specific to something you use yourself. Seeing the methods others used to solve their own problems would be really helpful to better your own problem solving skills.