Along the same lines, I also find it useful to have a text log for each sizeable task I undertake. This could contain anything, notes of module structure, code & data snippets for testing, everything!
Like one of the top comments mentions, it acts as a node of knowledge within a wider system (graph) and I end up revisiting these logs more often than you would expect! It only gets better as you explore/document more and edges form.
I’ve been doing something similar. If I read a blog post / paper, etc. where I learn a lot on a topic I’m interested in, I will catalogue a pdf of it in Obsidian with a tag and an optional note. This makes it easy to access information locally very quickly and I find I learn a lot more because if I forget something, I open up the resource, read the doc and, come out learning a little more. A kind of convoluted version of spaced-repetition but more passive learning.
Granted, I’m aware this probably won’t scale to many topics but a few years and hundreds of notes later, it’s still working well for me.
There’s read.cv which is a network, portfolio and job posting site that’s more focused towards the design community. I have seen software dev jobs posted in there too.
I’ve also struggled to find an alternative to LinkedIn (which is unbearable at times). Maybe the way forward is for each community to have its own unique platform, like read.cv for the design community, another for games, embedded, etc.
Aside from that Hacker news who’s hiring has been the most useful in discovering opportunities for me personally although I realise this is focused mainly on technology roles.
Excellent point. Giving my perspective as a relative newbie (~5 years) to the industry with no comp. sci. background.
It was around the year 3-4 mark that I decided to knuckle down and try to improve my fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, memory models, concurrency, CPU architecture and some network fundamentals) by reading popular papers and literature and writing all of my personal projects in C and C++. I’m about two years into this study and while it’s been immensely rewarding, I’ve found it to be a huge undertaking while juggling life and a full-time job.
What I’ve also noticed is that, while I understand a lot more about what the CPU is doing, memory manipulation and how to write more efficient programs, I haven’t found it be particularly beneficial to my daily work (still Python and JS). I would love to be able to put these concepts into practice for many hours of my working day but it’s difficult to move from general web-stack development to more performance-oriented development (embedded, low-latency, OS, etc.).
My guess is that this is one of the reasons we have ended up in this situation. You can get away without knowing the fundamentals (a good sign of progress?) and that if you really do want to pursue these areas that promote building this kind of knowledge as part of your career, the barrier to entry is quite high and the positions are fewer than say a decade or two ago. I find it a shame because in my eyes, these areas are the most interesting and exciting areas of programming. It’s an art.
I also think there could be a good opportunity to expand this to kitchen appliances too. Premium quality but really dumb. I would be a loyal customer