After CompSci

It’s the start of the second quarter of the year. You have some education budget that was refreshed and some companies goals you set. Know is the time to start planning out how you are going to use the budget for the year so that you can get the most out of it.

If you don’t know what you want I’d suggest something a little off the beaten path this year. Look into improving your writing skills or asking for some time and credits for playing with the new AI models. Bug your manager to test out ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor. The field of AI tools is changing each week and hasn’t settled so try to get your toes wet in it. Ask for some spend for creating MCP servers or testing out some new automation tooling like n8n to improve your dev workflows.

So here’s the list for April of 2025.

Conferences

Which language do you use the most at work or which one are you looking to use next? Find either the conference that is particular to your region or the worldwide conference. For me language conferences would be either PyCon or GopherCon, I have not personally been to either but these are the top ones for Python and Golang which I use. The other side of what I primarily do is operations with an emphasis on cloud and observability. For these I would either find a DevOps Day event, KubeCon event or possibly go to AWS reinvent or the cloud provider of choice that you use day to day. If you don’t have time to get into the conference this year see if you can pre buy next years ticket.

Books

Language of your Choice

• Look for recommended books in your languages discord, slack or hacker news threads
• Fluent Python
  • This book recommended to me by many of the best Python engineers I have worked with. It offers a good overview of more pythonic concepts and dives into deeper topics like meta programming.
• The Go Programming Language
  • When I was starting out with Go this was the book I read alongside the go docs. It’s a little older at this point but gives a good overview.

DevOps

• Phoenix Project
  • A interesting take on a fictional company going through a DevOps transformation. It’s unique in that it’s written as a story instead of as a technical book.
• SRE Book
  • A collection of articles and lessons from Google SRE team.
• Fundamentals of Software Architecture
  • A great overview of both the technical and soft skill associated with software architecture. One things to note is that a new version of this is coming out in 2025.
• Designing Data Intensive Applications
  • This has been a great team read to go over if you do book shares. The material goes over many of the problems you’ll face with larger systems over time especially when you hit larger scales.
• Accelerate
  • A great guide for organizational change as you try to implement a DevOps culture that will enable your teams to do more.
• Platform Engineering
  • This is a new addition this year and it is great. It’s one of the first books out on platform engineering in general which is something that has been around but is often hard to work in. This gives a nice overview of how to position and build a platform team so that it is beneficial to the org as a product engineer team. There’s also a good section on the overview of the different types of engineers that comprise a platform team too.

Career

• Managers Path
  • Great for folks looking to become managers and also understanding managers and their goals
• Staff Engineers Path
  • Like the managers path but for the dual track where ICs get to stay ICs
• Staff Engineer
  • A great overview of the Staff and Staff plus roles. The back half of it contains many interviews with Staff Plus engineers, checkout the site as well.
• The Software Engineers GuideBook
  • Currently reading this but it pretty good for getting a better idea of different portions of industry and the climb of the career ladder for Software Engineers. Also if you haven’t read his newsletter, The Pragmatic Engineer, it’s amazing.

Product/User Research

• The Mom Test
  • This is a great book for asking better questions to your users. It teaches you on how to effectively ask questions of possible users to ensure that you are solving their problems instead of pitching your product which does not solve their problems.

Interviewing

• Cracking the Coding Interview
• Elements of Programming Interviews

** NOTE: These might be trickier to expense without raising suspicion unless you say that you want to prep for the next step of helping with the interview loops at your company. This is also something to brush up on as you start rising up the career ladder.

Classes/Courses/Certifications

If you are looking to up your game I am a big fan of folks becoming systems engineers and starting to understand where their code eventually lives. Figure out which cloud provider and services you are using, if you aren’t sure or you don’t have one just choose AWS. AWS has a bunch of certificates you can apply for but a great place to start is their Cloud Practitioner cert. All the other cloud providers have these types of courses as well as other more specialized ones such as DevOps, Data Science or Machine Learning. All of these are pretty platform dependent but half the battle with deploys is knowing which environment you are deploying to and which resources they offer.

Writing

Take a writing course. This past year I have gone over the copy writing course Copy That. It’s taught by Sam Parr from the Hustle and the My First Million Podcast. Being able to write well and communicate effectively is a skill that many engineers lack, so being able to up skill there can separate you from the pack.

The book Smart Brevity was a good read this year as well. It highlighted how to more effectively communicate with concise language. It’s also a quick read that you can go through over a plane flight.

AI and LLMs

Over the past year there has been a crazy rise in popularity and ability with new AI tooling. Between the race for models to have larger token windows to specialized and reasoning models there’s been a lot. With all of this change it is nice to be able to familiarize yourself with what is out there and how you might use it. So ask for either paid access to models like ChatGPT or Claude. If you are looking into dev tools checkout the Cursor IDE or GitHub Copilot. This shouldn’t be too hard to pitch for a use case but just make sure that you are using these tools in a secure fashion when it comes to company data. Also researching out these tools can be used in your companies workflows would also be appreciated and a point to pitch.

The latest that we have seen in Q1 is the rise of new models like DeepSeek and better image models from OpenAI. In terms of working with the models we are seeing new advances like MCP which help bundle functions and tooling in one place for ease of use.

In closing ensure that you use the benefits that your company gives you, especially for career progression. Choices are always made in life, try to make sure you are the one making them. Try to guide your career in the direction you want as much as you possibly can.