What do you do if you want to maximize your growth in application development?

Always be learning and get certified for what to you learnt. Be bold in using latest techniques for application development so that you can be faster to market.

App dev demands a multifaceted approach to growth. It's about mastering the technical expertise & at the same time cultivating a well-rounded skillset around business acumen, and a growth mindset. From a technical standpoint, one should remain relevant to the industry by contributing to open source & discussion forums, attending workshops, and being in touch with the local or international community. To sell skills, one also needs to get certified. From a business point of view, one should read case studies of different businesses (success or failure). Finally, the key to sustained growth lies in an unwavering commitment to continuous learning and innovation. Keep experimenting!

Imagine you're embarking on a journey to maximize your growth in application development. It's like setting sail on a vast ocean of possibilities, where every wave represents a new challenge and every breeze carries the promise of learning and innovation. As you navigate this journey, one of the first steps is to anchor yourself in continuous learning. Just like a sailor studies the stars and charts, immerse yourself in the latest technologies, coding languages, and development frameworks. Embrace online courses, coding bootcamps, and tech forums as your compass to stay on course.

Gain practical experience through real projects, refine and refactor code for readability, performance, and maintainability. Stay curious, delve into 'Why' aspects, and explore new tech via reading, learning, and attending conferences.

One of the ways to do this is to align your current project / client needs with the standards running in market and reference Architectures. Technologies are the tools, but what's more important is to select what goes best and for the term the project has. A typical example is that Frontends move fast, so you need to move quickly in that, whereas if we talk about Backend, you need more compatibility with stable and long releases. Choices differ here case by case. So focus appropriately on your bets.

Yet, sailing alone won't get you far. Seek out mentors and seasoned sailors in the tech community. Their wisdom and experience act as lighthouses guiding you through stormy seas and uncharted territories. Learn from their journeys, embrace their advice, and let their insights illuminate your path. But remember, growth doesn't happen in isolation. Collaborate with diverse crews of designers, testers, and project managers. Each collaboration is a voyage of discovery, where you learn to navigate different viewpoints, iterate on ideas, and steer towards shared goals.

Once you've made the choices, it's extremely necessary how you practice the skill. For that, you may use online platforms or solve the unknown areas not explored by your team, but you feel could be useful. While practicing, do have a habit of getting things reviewed. There are known online platforms for the same. Also, participating in online platforms like StackOverflow or CodeProject helps you to enhance your skills by solving small problems of others.

Focus on manual churn from user perspective and automate those manual processes to make application more user friendly and robust. T-shaped development team and awareness of end to end processes of application use .

This can be done best by putting code on GitHub public repo for sharable projects or from your peers. Once you practice that, you're effectively opening your mind and broadening skillset.

GitHub, StackOverflow, CodeProject - all of these are open source supporting portals. Raise PRs and help everyone - including yourself. Reviewing peer codes or PRs is also an extension once you've expanded your skills.

This is super important as if you fail in this, the things can go south. One of the ways to do this is to refer to platforms like Behance or similar platforms. Go more on understanding how your implementation should match with user expectations and how may parallel components will be there interacting with backend - so that you can effectively scale the full platform. Getting on calls with customer and Product Owner is again a useful way to understand all about users.

One must always be prepared to step outside oneself, and learn/create with new technologies. After all, the best way to grow, is to grow into technological changes.

Embrace challenges as opportunities to hoist your skills higher. Just as a ship's hull is strengthened by turbulent waters, your coding prowess grows stronger with each bug fixed, each algorithm optimized, and each feature deployed. And don't forget the importance of a well-maintained vessel. Regularly review and refactor your codebase, adopt agile methodologies for smoother voyages, and prioritize user feedback as your compass for user-centric development. In this journey of maximizing your growth in application development, each code commit is a knot tied, each successful deployment is a milestone reached, and each satisfied user is a port of call in your voyage towards mastery. Bon voyage!