Comment by linesofcode

I think some of the best engineering leveling up one can do is to become an expert in other domains completely unrelated to what you’re working on now.

Furthermore, build more and read less. Programming books, while a great resource, are detached from the everyday realities for software engineering. The skillset comes from applying concepts by doing the work.

If you really want to read something, pick a popular project on GitHub in Elixir or Zig and read through its source code.

Finally, if you haven’t augmented your workflows with AI-tooling, strongly consider doing so (and I don’t mean asking ChatGPT and copy/pasting answers, but actually full on agentic programming)

The skill gap you’re concerned about now is only going to increase if you’re not using every tool to your advantage. Simply knowing a few programming languages is not enough, in fact it should barely even matter once you’ve hit a certain level of experience.