Software engineering for web is vast, so vast that “you can’t know everything” holds as a truism. We might (might!) be living in a time of information flattening, yet having an LLM spit out something does not equate to understanding the output. It’s the difference between reading a script and a performance, if you will.

Attaining complete knowledge is not the point, though the idea of “having the world’s knowledge at your fingertips” has been woven into the mythos of internet software. It is the pursuit of that knowledge which creates the journey of discovery and joy we might call “learning”.

Job searching itself is not building intelligence around the actual practices of software engineering or product design. Job searching has its own rhythms and practices that become dormant once you get a job. There’s an irony that, while searching for a job, the skills to perform that job can gather rust if you don’t find a way to use them, either through pet projects or freelance work. I’ve been lucky to pick up some freelance work which keeps me grounded in what software development is really like. Not just the design and code, but the self-organization, prioritization and so forth. For that I am grateful.

What’s great about talking to different people at different companies and perusing job listings is finding out how much is OUT THERE. Things I know a little about, unknowns that spark curiosity, knowledge I forgot, and so on. One of my goals for the next few weeks is to carve out a handful of hours each week to get a little deeper into each of these discoveries. Sure, it’s for the next job, but a lot of it is for my own personal sense of self. Like Dr. Cox in pursuit of his “perfect game”, attaining perfection of knowledge is not the point. The point is trying, and what you pick up along the way.

Here’s a sample of what I’ve come up with since June:

  1. Building an LLM from scratch
  2. Using LangChain / LangGraph
  3. Generative UI
  4. Cloudflare Workers
  5. Kafka
  6. Serverless functions
  7. Figma /UI Design
  8. SwiftUI
  9. Graph traversal
  10. Dynamic programming