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The current world situation is (hopefully) something we'll experience once in our lives. In a sense, for us developers, it is a unique opportunity to take advantage of all this free time to perfect our skills. If you did not do at least one of those items, you might have missed a great opportunity to take your career to the next level.
Update your portfolio
Your portfolio is both where you describe yourself and your experience and you have an unique opportunity to showcase your skills and your creativity in this sandbox. The more unique the better.
Catch up on (new) technologies
New packages and frameworks come out almost every day, it's pretty much impossible to keep up. However, now's a one of a kind chance for you to read and play with this fancy new tech you never got the chance to take a couple of hours with. Don't forget it doesn't have to be a new technology. You can definitely catch up on anything that can help your day-to-day job. As an example, I am reading a lot on design systems and on Web Accessibility lately.
Think about your career path
When we're on the 40h/week wave, we tend to put our career on cruise control and not think about it too much. What about sitting with a coffee and thinking about if you're where you wanted to be a year earlier. Even better, are you doing the right things to get where you aim career-wise? And where do you want to go in the first place? You should all write that down with a clear goal and some action items to achieve this. If you struggle with all of this, your manager certainly can help with that.
Find a side hustle
Ever heard of passive income? As a developer, you are in the best position possible to build and publish some source of passive income over the internet. Don't get me wrong, it is super hard to get it to even pay back your servers (don't even think about your time your put in it). My point here is not to get rich, but more to get your hands dirty in a real project where you have to touch to every part of a complex project (design, front-end, back-end, ...). The journey is more important than the destination in that use case, and I found myself learning way more doing that than any other project.
Contribute to an open-source project
Chances are you are daily using an open-source library. Ever wonder how the heck they achieve [any problem it actually solves for you]? Well, why don't you take 5 minutes and dig in their code? Often times, you'll realize they have a very similar project structure to your own project, and that not this many code is involved. Or even better (at least I felt this way the first times I opened OSS code): you realize you can understand their code. At some point, you'll even see things they could improve! What now? Why not simply opening a pull request on their repo!
Whether that's to update your 4 years old portfolio, reading a ton of articles over the internet, writing what seems to be useless Codepens, or starting a new side-project, I hope you tried your best at taking advantage of the pandemic by improving your skills as a developer. Did I miss to cover something else in my list (I probably did.)? If so, write it down in the comments!
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