At the core, I’m a software developer. No matter how much I learn about system thinking, product, design or any other area, at the end of the day, I still have to code and do it well.

I’ve been thinking about the craft and if I am where I want to be, or if I’m improving steadily. In some areas, definitely. In other areas, I feel stagnant, and not as confident as before. One of those areas is the actual coding. It’s not that I cannot write good code, it’s more about not growing enough in the past two years.

The plan is not to be a leetcode master or pass a tricky algorithm question in a FAANG interview. I’m looking for fluency, mastery, and a lot of practice in different challenges. Some of these challenges can only be found in real life situations in companies, but, meanwhile, I can practice on my own.

What’s the plan, then? It’s a work in progress. For now, I am eager to learn a new language at a good level, currently Rust but also thinking about Kotlin later on—the former for “pleasure” and the latter for “professional” use. I’ve chosen Rust because I want to get closer to the metal and reminiscence my experience with C++ when I started coding. Fun fact, Bjarne Stroustrup has released the 3rd edition of Programming Principles and Practices using C++, one of my favourite books.

I have many ideas, many books, and resources to go through and projects. One of the ideas is to go back to doing coding katas, something like Codewars or Exercism, even if it’s a few minutes a day. In terms of projects, John Cricket’s Coding Challenges are quite interesting as they have you building real applications. Now, books, my favourite topic—too many books, not enough lives—, here’s a potential list with some books:

Projects and exercises

• Building Git

• Crafting Interpreter, Robert Nystrom

• Études for Programmers, Charles Wetherell.

• Mazes for Programmers

• Build a Frontend Web Framework

Rust and Kotlin

• Hands-on Rust

• Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches

• Rust in Action

• Zero to Production in Rust

• Kotlin in Action

Fundamentals

• Practical Object-Oriented Design

• Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design

• Grokking Algorithms

• Refactoring, 2nd ed.

• Grokking Simplicity

The list doesn’t mean I’m going to read all of them, many months would be needed to do that. Currently, I’m focusing on learning Rust with Hands-on Rust and Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches. At some point, I’ll start looking at the coding challenges or one of the books in the projects and exercises section, and doing them in Rust.

With more time, I’d also continue reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications, since it’s an instrumental book in my path to get better at architecture. For now, I’ll put most of my focus on the craft.

Interesting links

• Moving IO to the edges of your app: Functional Core, Imperative Shell - Scott Wlaschin. Highly recommended talk showing how to keep I/O away from your business logic.

• I Want to Belong - Creating Environments where Women Thrive with Dr Cat Hicks. “A conversation about belonging, discussing how to create an environment where women who code feel like they can belong – and what this kind of environment unlocks for technical innovation and wellbeing for everyone.”

• Why I Quit My Climate Tech Startup in 2022. “Increasingly it became obvious to me that what most players in ‘ocean tech’ wanted to do, including my co-founders, was to replace the heavy fuel oil powered shipping industry with one just as extractive. Just with different people in the helm.”