Caleb Mellas

Soft skills are all about things like: - responsibility and ownership - technical expertise and communication - how you approach problems - leadership and mentoring skills - scope of your influence So how can you grow in these areas? Here are a few ways I’ve grown my skills to level up in my career 🚀 1️⃣ Study consistently, don’t rush 2️⃣ Ask for help when you get stuck 3️⃣ Make friends with growth-minded people 4️⃣ Welcome imposter syndrome as your friend 5️⃣ Don’t be afraid to look bad at new things 6️⃣ Record and review your wins 7️⃣ Volunteer for hard projects 8️⃣ Look for ways to be a force-multiplier 9️⃣ Work on your communication skills 🔟 Read books on teamwork, networking, effective communication and leadership

In my own journey I’ve often wondered if software engineers ahead of me were somehow smarter or built different. However, slowly but surely I’ve made progress over the years, realizing my dreams. Here is a helpful framework for learning: Step 1: Read the official docs, grab a book, etc. Step 2: Try it out Step 1a: Do more reading / research Step 3: Get it working Step 4: Refactor Step 5: Summarize and document Step 6: Share what you’ve learned I’ve used it throughout my career to go from a graphic designer to frontend engineering, to fullstack engineer, to tech lead, and now headed towards engineering manager. If you choose consistency it works!

In my own journey I’ve often wondered if software engineers ahead of me were somehow smarter or built different. However, slowly but surely I’ve made progress over the years, realizing my dreams. Here is a helpful framework for learning: Step 1: Read the official docs, grab a book, etc. Step 2: Try it out Step 1a: Do more reading / research Step 3: Get it working Step 4: Refactor Step 5: Summarize and document Step 6: Share what you’ve learned I’ve used it throughout my career to go from a graphic designer to frontend engineering, to fullstack engineer, to tech lead, and now headed towards engineering manager. If you choose consistency it works!

Make it work, then make it clean and organized. Here is a helpful outline I’ve followed when learning new skills and frameworks. Step 1: Read the official docs, grab a book, etc. Step 2: Try it out Step 1a: Do more reading / research Step 3: Get it working Step 4: Refactor Step 5: Summarize and document Step 6: Share what you’ve learned Refactor and optimize happens after you get the initial program working. After that you want to summarize what you learned and share it with others to further cement your learning and helps others level up alongside you.

How to plan out a large project: Ask a million questions: - Who are we building this for? - What are the technical limitations? - What is the product appetite? - What does success look like? - Do we have a product requirements doc? - Do we have an outline I should follow for writing the technical spec? - Do we have any performance SLAs we need to meet? - What are we purposely not solving during this project? You’ll want to take your product requirements doc and start building out a technical spec doc. Now that we know what we are building, how will we build it? For me it all comes back to features and user stories. I like to take each feature and start thinking through how I would build it.

Anything over 2 wks in length should be broken up into milestones Break down the milestones into features or user stories Break down those user stories into tasks for frontend and backend. Input these tasks into your project management software with a clear summary and acceptance criteria. Each task should be fleshed out throughly enough that anyone could pick up the task and have enough context to complete it. Breaking a complex problem down helps you: – Focus on one thing at a time – Make sense of a complex problem – Zone in on the priority for each smaller chunk – Develop accurate estimates – Gain momentum while building – Build confidence in solving complex problems