I always worry about keeping myself updated in this fast-paced era. But I've noticed that I stay quite up to date compared to a good number of developers around me.
I want to share my journey with the people around me, especially new engineers entering this fast moving bullet train called software engineering.
For me, it was a bit of luck in the beginning, but I'll tell you how not to be at the mercy of luck.
In 2023, when I was very new to university and only knew a bit of competitive programming and had just an introduction to building a basic web app using JavaScript, luckily or maybe being good at CP, I got an internship at a fintech organisation in Bangalore, India. Even more luckily, I got a project involving RAG, LLMs, and search algorithms. That pushed me into understanding how data science and AI are shaping the world.
In 2023, ChatGPT was still relatively new, but I sensed the future (or at least what is happening today) and how it would shape developers' lifestyles and the future of engineering.
