
Ask HN: How to overcome your skill plateau as a programmer? - apollopower
Hi all,<p>I&#x27;ve been working professionally as a software developer for 3-4 years, and am currently in a large engineering organization (not a FAANG but a financial firm). While the day-to-day work I do is &quot;coding&quot;, little of it has been on projects where I feel I&#x27;ve come out more knowledgeable about building good software.<p>My current struggle is having recognized the __large__ gap between writing &quot;code that works&quot; and writing programs that are stable, maintainable, and extensible. As much as I&#x27;ve been aware of it, I still find myself writing more of the former than the latter. Work projects feel limiting on how much I can explore new ideas &#x2F; re-think architecture and design philosophies, while personal projects have felt mediocre and any attempt at writing good code has come off as &quot;premature optimization&quot;.<p>I love programming, but this skill&#x2F;understanding plateau has left me a bit burned out recently.<p>Have any of you ever experienced something similar after a few years in the industry or as professionals? How did you deal with it, and what were some actionable steps that helped you overcome it?<p>I know some of you on HN have been programming for decades, so I&#x27;m curious to hear what were the moments you were able to take and become better engineers.<p>Thank you for any insights you may have!
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sacks2k
Side projects. You can try any new modern framework you want with a side
project.

Also, read the code of good projects on Github.

