After CompSci

Whenever you join a new field it’s important to get yourself familiar with it’s nomenclature and culture. Just like learning a language for a specific group of people you need to learn the vernacular(day to day speech). The best way to do this is to immerse yourself into the reading and learning materials for that community.

Here’s what I would read if I was starting out and what I still read.

Hacker News

I check Hacker News a couple of times a day. It’s a good place to spot trends when they are coming up, the big tech news of the day and cool projects that are launching. Imagine being able to hear about the Ethereum Launch day but then failing to setup your wallet and going to a circuits class instead. But it’s all good there’s tons of interesting things that come through here each week. If you want to see what people are building checkout the Show HN page. Over time I have found some interesting personal blogs to follow on here as well.

Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky has been writing software for decades and keeping a blog for that long. If you ever wanted to know who created the Stack Overflow or Trello it was this guy and his team. He also created the Joel Test which is a list of attributes to judge an org on to see how their engineering practices are. Asking questions about the items in the Joel test is a great things to ask during interviews to get a feel for a company.

Indie Hackers

This is a community of people who are building out side projects or creating small businesses. They are mostly small companies but some grow quickly and expand. This is a good place to hangout to learn about building products. It’s where to go when you don’t need to just focus on engineering. Becuase at the end of the day the our engineering skills are just a toolset we use to solve problems that people will pay for.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham has been writing tech essays for a few decades now on his blog. He’s known for being a tech VC, most notably being a Cofounder of Y Combinator. His essays are an interesting look into tech from a higher level strategic view, some of the ideas might be a bit more Bay Area centric but it has been expanding over the years. If you aren’t reading them yourself then you will probably see them pop up on Hacker News or in other areas. Some commonly referenced essays are Maker Scheduler, Manager Schedule and more recently How to do Great Work.

Michael Lynch(mtlynch.io)

He’s a software engineer who left Google to start his own companies. He started out running them by himself and then turned one of them into a small business, tiny pilot. He’s recently sold it but he still posts monthly retros about what he is working on and some posts each month.

Stay SaaSy

Stay SaaSy is a little more business and startup strategy focused.
This is a great blog post, there’s usually around two articles or so a month and they have a solid backlog. It’s written anonymously by a couple of writers. The writers have exited a few startups from low millions in revenue to $100M plus in revenue. There’s advice on how to be impactful in your org, what problems startups usually fall into, startups wisdom not frequently talked about and much more. Take a look at some of their guides which are clusters of posts on a specific topic. One of the recent articles I like was I Like Dumb Plans.

Specialization Zones

Below are some areas where you might specialize as you get into tech, you should take a look for learning resources and communities to learn about these.

• Programming Languages
• Eco Systems(Cloud provider, OS, solutions group)
• Disciplines(FE,BE, Ops, Security)
• Engineering for your particular industry(Health, Finance, Embedded, AI, Data)

When you are getting into industry try to get a large amount of exposure, this will help you more quickly figure out what you want to do. Once you figure that out start niching down for that specific discipline and start learning as much as you can. Remember when possible hands on learning will take you further than just reading alone. You will probably end up with a programming language or two, an eco systems(AWS, GCP, Azure/Microsoft), and a discpline(Front End, Back End, DevOps, Security, AI). From there see if there is a specific industry that you are in, see if there are any engineering communities specific to that industry. In doing so you will be able to advance further by immersing yourself in these communities. Below are some places where you can find these places.

Subreddits

For your niche of industry or programming language find the subreddits that are available. Personally I follow the Python, DevOps and Go subreddits. These are tools or disciplines that I am currently using or have used in the past. Inside of here you can get some interesting discussions but sadly there is a bit more noise than signal. So get an idea of what is happening in the industry from here but don’t let it consume you.

Slack or Discord groups

Just like the subreddits you can find niche communities around different languages, tools or engineering disciplines. For DevOps I’d recommend hangops. It’s pretty active and there are tons of different channels for specific topics.

Podcasts

There is definitely a podcast for any of the items listed above. If there is not for something then you probably have some room to create content there.

Staff Engineering

Checkout the staff engineering blog, the book is also great. This blog highlights the skillsets and experiences of Staff Plus Engineers, these are the roles post Senior Engineer. This is generally one of the highest levels of the career ladder an engineer can reach. At this point you are leading org wide initiatives for your business unit and helping shape the direction of your company from an engineering perspective. I particularly like the stories section. Take a look at the one from Silvia Botros, she’s an amazing engineer who was leading a lot of the DB work at SendGrid while I was there. Super knowledgable about the DB portion of the craft.

The most important thing is to find out what you are interested in these and those are the ones to follow. See what helps fill in the knowledge gaps, but if you don’t have anything yet or are looking for something new look here.

If you have any questions head over to the After CompSci Discord server. For those looking to learn some more real world engineering skills to help get that first job take a look at the After CompSci course as well.