Soft skills

I got around to starting the MDN Curriculum today. In line with my awesome new researching skills, I took some notes and came up with what I would like to work on next. For context, the goal this month is to work through as much of the curriculum and construct TODOs based on them, finishing as many as I can by week 3.

Starting from the very beginning: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/curriculum/getting-started/soft-skills/. I'm already a software engineer with two years in the industry, but as I taught myself to code at 14, I have a smorgasboard of bad habits and gaps in my development. These are the areas I identified for improvement:

Reading technical news

I've always been active on Reddit, lurking and answering questions in communities like r/NixOS. Recently, I've found a way I like to read RSS feeds, and I plan to keep adding more to this.

Networking

I've found a local meetup and plan to go meet some fellow engineers. I normally hate networking and hate most of the people in the industry who are just here for the money, but I'll give it a shot - my coworkers have changed my mind and I accept that there are engineers out there even in the Singaporean rat race who truly care and have a passion for engineering.

Contributing to Open Source Software

I'm already a nixpkgs and home-manger maintainer and have contributed to a few Nix projects (and a small contribution to Hyprland), but it's only been for select software that I wanted to improve for myself. I want to make this more regular and build my name more, and make some connections in the community. I am planning to engage in Open Source Fridays, setting aside two hours on Fridays to pick an issue and work on it, preferably in Rust to keep up my skills there and expose myself to production Rust code.

Finding issues to contribute to

• https://firstcontributions.github.io/
• https://goodfirstissues.com/
• https://goodfirstissue.dev/
• https://up-for-grabs.net/#/
• https://www.codetriage.com/
• https://forgoodfirstissue.github.com/
• https://github.com/showcases/great-for-new-contributors

Building a persona

I've already started this blog to practise my writing and document and share my efforts to being a better engineer (and overall person). Further work I'd like to do in this area is to write a better README.md for my pet project, and craft a portfolio/CV that I can show to employers and for my own personal enjoyment. I also plan to watch https://bigmachine.io/articles/video/get-involved/ when I have the time.

Writing good READMEs

Write a title that describes the project in one sentence. The description should include what the project does, what technologies were used and why, what challenges were faced if any, and future features planned.

To ease onboarding, it should also include the steps to set up and install the project, as well as any required dependencies or credentials. Including an overview of the repository, its structure, architecture, and design principles also helps.

Lastly, include credits and acknowledgement, and a license. Optionally, include badges like those from https://shields.io.

Conclusion

That's all for today! See you tomorrow.

References

• https://opensourcefriday.com/
• https://www.firsttimersonly.com/
• https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-write-a-good-readme-file/