Developer Career

This hub is about growing as a software engineer: getting through interviews, getting better at the work, learning efficiently, and making career decisions you will not regret. It is written by an engineer who still writes and ships code, so the advice comes from the job as it is today rather than from a recruiter's checklist.

It is for developers in the early and middle stages of their careers. That includes someone preparing for a first system design round, someone trying to work out what separates a mid-level engineer from a senior one, and someone wondering how much AI tools change what is worth learning. If you want a shortcut, there is none here. If you want a clear map of what matters and why, that is the goal.

The approach favours substance over motivation. Interview posts explain the concepts behind the questions, with trade-offs and sources, so you can reason through a prompt you have never seen instead of reciting an answer you memorised. Claims about how a system works are checked against official documentation and published engineering write-ups, and the sources are listed. Career advice is kept clear about what is opinion and what is evidence, and there are no invented success stories or salary figures.

Where to start: system design interview prep, covering the twelve patterns that matter, is the best first read if you have interviews coming up. It walks through load balancing, caching, sharding, queues, idempotency and the rest, with what each one costs and how to explain it out loud. The System Design and Software Engineering hubs go deeper on the same ideas, and new career posts will join this list as they are published.