Here's how you can level up your coding skills using new technology.

Identify a recurring task or a persistent problem you encounter frequently. Attempt to automate this task or solve the problem, prompting you to explore new technologies and expand your horizons in the process.

Typically you go about selecting your IDE based on the technology you're working with, so your best bet is to do some research on that. There are many options for IDEs out there but ideally you want to pick the most popular to start with. Besides, the most popular IDE nowadays would be VS Code. Make sure you look for some plugins such as github copilot (or alternatives), prettier and git. They will make your life much easier and boost your productivity.

Pair programming can be very beneficial, especially for junior developers. A pair programming session could entail one developer writing code while sharing their screen (or using a pair programming platform) with the other developer, trying to come to the conclusion to a problem while working through it. It could be architecture, code or testing. There are lots of benefits with this practice such as real-time exchange of technical knowledge, different approaches of resolving the same problem as well as project immersiveness. Hot take: Pair programming is more educational than PR reviews!

It's industry standard to have a git repository when working in a team. The more the team grows, the messier code can get (and it will). By Using a VCS like git, you avoid common issues such as unintentionally deleting files/code and introducing a bug in the application. When using git, for instance, you can easily revert a commit (term for "saving" the state of the code source) when things go wrong. You'll also be able to merge other code into yours, keeping it all in sync. Lastly, I strongly recommend you look into git flow to learn how more about branches and so on.

Once you have your development environment ready to be deployed, it's good practice to consider CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) integration. One of its most powerful capabilities is, it automates a whole delivery pipeline when merging a PR into the "main/master" branch (it can also be configured to be triggered some other way). It automates jobs such as running unit tests, building the application, deploying to a production server or submitting to an app store (in case of mobile apps) and even deploying to a test environment server. The most popular ones are Jenkins, Github Actions, CircleCI and Gitlab CI.

Find a mentor!!! Yes, it can be a bit inconvenient until you find the right one but this can significantly help you in your journey.