I blinked and it's March. That's not entirely true, January was 100 years long, then February showed up, and at least here in Central Texas, that m...
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The main focus for this year is interacting on Dev.to and practice my interviewing skills. I notice that I am on track on the developer side, but am bad at articulating my thoughts in the interview phase. I am hoping to improve my communication skills in terms of interviewing and hope for the best!
Overall, great post! Thanks for sharing :D
This is great! Thanks for sharing! You got this :)
I'm new to Devto, but I think it will be great journey for me and all of us
Welcome to Dev!
Welcome!!!
I have started using AI to help me interview better. How? Record and transcribe the interview. Feed it to an LLM trained to think like someone in a senior role interviewing job applicants. I tend to prattle on, and Claude with a little training has really helped me tighten up those "tell me about a time" narratives.
n.b.: secretly recording people is illegal in many US jurisdictions. If you choose to do this, best to delete the audio as soon as you're done.
I try to understand the wasm byte format to able write a wasm code like coding assembler 30+years ago. This journey lead me to create a text representation of wasm different than a WAT. For this process is arguing to AI is help a lot.
This is such a grounded list, especially the part about having an actual personal narrative around AI. Not a hot take, just a clear sense of where you use it, where you do not, and why. That alone makes you easier to trust in interviews and in teams.
Never stop interviewing is painful advice but true. The skill rots if you do not touch it, and the market shifts under you while you are busy living your life. Treating interviews like practice reps instead of emergencies is a good way to keep your nervous system calmer.
The resume point also lands. What helped me is keeping a tiny running log of shipped work and decisions, then the resume becomes a clean extract instead of a memory test twice a year.
Also loved the community section. The bookstore events example is a good reminder that community is not only tech meetups. Sometimes the best reset is being around people who care about something totally different.
If you had to pick one tiny habit from this list that gives the biggest return, what would it be.
Updated resume. Just like you mentioned, keeping a running list of things - work you do, kudos you get, things you learned - is great, but being able to distill it into the value and experience gained, is huge. This translates across the other topics, like interviewing.
Yes, that is the real skill. The running list is just raw material. The hard part is translating it into value without inflating it.
What helped me was writing each bullet in two layers. First the plain fact of what changed. Then the why it mattered, like what risk it reduced, what friction it removed, what it made easier for the next person. Once you do that a few times, interviews get easier too because you are not searching your memory under stress, you are just telling the story you already clarified.
Do you have a format you use for distilling. Like challenge, action, outcome, or do you keep it more freeform.
I'm more freeform, but I wouldn't say I'm an expert in resume building for everyone.
Totally fair, and honestly freeform is usually the best starting point. If you can write it in a way that sounds like a real human, that already puts you ahead of most resumes.
I think the real win is what you said about distilling value and experience gained. Even a simple habit like asking what changed because of this and who did it help makes the bullet points sharper without turning them into corporate speak.
If you ever feel like sharing one example of how you rewrote a raw note into a final resume line, I bet people would find it more helpful than any generic resume advice.
I'm unlikely to share more specific resume advice after receiving harassment online the last time I did this. If I find resources on this, I'll happily share them, but I need to protect myself and won't be offering more specific resume advice at this time.
That makes total sense. I am sorry that happened to you, and I respect the boundary. Please do not feel any pressure to share specifics. If you come across any general resources or frameworks that are safe to point to, I would be glad to read them. Appreciate you being here and protecting your own safety.
Thanks for the prompt! My main focus this year is optimizing my AI-accelerated workflows, but also not losing sight of the big picture. That's why I'm also taking a deep dive into distributed systems. And I'm learning in public! dev.to/abustamam/series/36007 (apologies if posting a link is inappropriate; please let me know if you'd like me to delete). Through this I want to build my brand as an expert in "classical engineering" (web development, distributed systems) but also "new engineering" (AI-accelerated workflows etc).
I agree with you -- writing is cathartic. That said, I do admit that I use AI to help me synthesize information, outline my blog posts, etc. But I feel like AI will never have my voice. I piped one of my blog posts into Chat GPT once and it was like "this is not professional" and I'm just like, well I'd rather be me than be professional! Besides, while AI overuses em-dashes, I overuse semicolons and parentheses.
My dad loves birds; when we walk together the few times a year I see him, he's always able to identify birds based on their warbles, time of day/year, migration patterns, etc. I bought him an AI birdhouse for his birthday a few years ago. I don't know if he uses it though; I don't know why he would when his intuition is a lot better than AI right now!
But I picked piano back up after 20 years having not played; I'm not as good as I was before and most of the time when I practice I have a baby in one arm, but it's still a fun hobby and it's one of the few things besides milk that can calm the little one!
Great post! Thanks for sharing.
Same! Professional can be too stuffy and boring. I also love a good use of semicolons, although I use them less after working for non-American companies.
Thanks for sharing! Good luck with your deep dive and learning in public.
Great and timely post! February always flies by I agree...
This year I am getting more involved in my local tech communities and also on Dev.to.
I am educating myself on AI tooling and using it mainly for ideation and automating repetitive tasks.
As for hobbies, I enjoy reading and exercising and like to start and end my days with these. With tech moving so fast, it grounds me to have these hobbies as anchors in my daily routine.
Love reading and exercising to get you away from screens!! I am a huge fan of spin classes myself.
Love this post—super practical roadmap for 2026! The "form real opinions on AI tools" bit hit home; I've been doing that with Claude and it totally sharpens your edge in interviews. Never stop interviewing is my new mantra too. What community are you diving into first? 🚀
As a Developer Advocate I do a lot of community work in my day to day role. But! I'm planning to get back into more local bookstore events like author meet and greets.
Good reminders here, especially about keeping your resume updated and practicing interviews. I’ve interviewed hundreds of engineers, and many capable developers struggle to explain what they actually built and why it mattered.
Really enjoyed this perspective. I like that ur list isn’t just about “learning more tech”, but also about building a sustainable career and mindset.
The part about developing your own opinions around AI tools really stood out to me. In the Python + AI space, I’ve noticed that the most productive approach is using AI as an assistant for brainstorming, debugging, or summarizing ideas — while still doing the real thinking and building yourself.
I also strongly agree with the idea of never completely losing the skill of interviewing and keeping your resume updated. Those are things many developers only think about when they suddenly need them.
And the “geek out on something” advice is underrated. Having interests outside of code actually helps avoid burnout.
Thanks for sharing this — curious to know if any of these habits have changed the way you approach learning over time?
I think AI is actually a great example of how I've changed my approach to learning overtime.
I decided to use Claude specifically to do some summarization to validate something I had already read. Up until that point I really only used AI as a search mechanism. This was kind of a gentle introduction to how I could see myself actually using AI productively so long as I felt like the output adequately reflected what I understood as well.
In a recent interview cycle I did get asked how I was using AI and my response was "reluctantly." Now this was about a year ago at this point, but I strongly felt like the AI tools and models I had access to just weren't a great experience. I was under a bit of a mandate to use them and they required a lot of effort to produce something I felt like I could do on my own in less time. Fast forward to a few months ago, I'm willing to try different AI tools for different purposes and reasons because I want to develop these meaningful opinions about them rather than simply ignore AI entirely. This was reinforced by going to a meetup and hearing about how other people are using AI at their jobs.
Same here! January felt like it would never end, and suddenly March is here and I'm wondering where my 'learn something new everyday' resolution went. 😅
Completely agree on the AI part having an opinion on AI tools is becoming as essential as having an email ID in the 2000s. It's not about using AI for everything, but knowing when not to use it is equally important.
Also, 'barely letting tools check my grammar' respect that! There's something authentic about raw, human-written content.
There is so much left of the year! You can still learn something new almost everyday!
I've been using iNaturalist for ages for species identification
Thank you for sharing
Great Post
Love this perspective. In 2026, I’m focusing on using AI as a thinking partner, not a shortcut. I want to build more real projects and keep my GitHub active instead of just consuming tutorials.
I'll try Swift and C#, and watch WWDC 2026 at Apple Park.
Really appreciate the support 🙌
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Online and offline communities are important, and so are professional trainings. I used to enroll in Frontend Masters courses, Shopware Academy, testing and refactoring workshops, and I'm currently thinking about attending a training at LinuxHotel who have a devOps and backend focus, to strengthen my full stack experience.
There is a recent popular post about an allegedly "illegal" visit to a tech show and a DevOps meetup, about knowledge, connection and inspiration as well. Thus, in my experience it's not only about what (which topics) to learn but also about where and how we do it.
i'm planning to switch my domain however as there are plenty of options available i procrastinate on what to learn and where to learn. Would like to know from fellow readers how they navigate through this challenge.
"Never stop interviewing"
Spot on. Getting the reps in is the number one thing for making anything less difficult and stressful.
Incidentally, I have started using AI to help me interview better. How? Record and transcribe the interview. Feed it to an LLM trained to think like someone in a senior role interviewing job applicants. I tend to prattle on, and Claude with a little training has really helped me tighten up those "tell me about a time" narratives.
n.b.: secretly recording people is illegal in many US jurisdictions. If you choose to do this, best to delete the audio as soon as you're done.
Edge AI is worth exploring if you haven't yet. The gap between cloud AI and what you can run locally has shrunk dramatically — 8B parameter models now run at ~15 tokens/sec on hardware that draws less than 25W. The self-hosted AI community is growing fast, and the tooling has gotten surprisingly good for building autonomous agents that run 24/7 on your desk.
There are some great tips there, thank you :)
I think having a non-tech hobby is a really healthy thing, given the nature of our jobs. Stained glass sounds intriguing!
Definitely keep the CV up to date. It can also be a good way to reflect on the past six months and remind ourselves of the highlights. Or, a nudge to look elsewhere if there is no sense of achievement at all the current role...
I do have concerns about the 'always interview' thing, though. From an employee perspective it makes a huge amount of sense. However, interviewing candidates is very expensive, so to think that some of the applicants might not be serious job hunters does not sit well with me. We already have enough problems as applicants not getting any response at all or no useful feedback if we do receive a rejection, plus concerns about how unfair it is when candidates do their best only to find out that the company was just going through the motions before promoting from within. If I want to be treated with respect by a potential employer, I think I should treat them with that same respect as a potential employee, and not waste their time putting myself forward for a role just to get the practice at their expense.
Also, I saw a grey butcherbird for the first time last week, that was cool! What's your favourite bird that you've seen in the wild?
I believe that artificial intelligence programs will help create a kind of positive interaction with scientific material, which can sometimes be dry, and that these programs can contribute to absorbing negative energy through communication with it!
What I dreamed of in my childhood and youth, scenarios of waking dreams, can be implemented in the form of a visual scenario... It makes you creative instead of being a dreamer or perhaps a fool!
You are funny! Maybe, you can learn agentic ai :). I enjoy your post.