I don’t just want to learn how to scrap together applications.

I want to become an engineer; one that can wear that badge properly.

I spent a day or two reading my peers code base in .NET Core to start learning its wizarding ways. I found myself emulating some of the patterns.

Then I found a tutorial series on putting together a correctly decoupled RESTful API...the same chap wrote an SDK for Azure CosmoDB.

THIS is what I am talking about.

I can’t believe these guys at work have twenty years C# experience between them and they are churning out this shit for more than 1.5x my salary.

I want to become this but I swear half the coding world does NOT care.

This is what seperates you from this other half of the industry.

I just need a half reliable path. I’ve only been a developer for a year professionally, but I don’t want too many bad habits to settle in whilst my enthusiasm is still high.

I have got copies of a couple of The Great Tomes (Uncle Bob), and I am chewing on some well written open-source for more concrete example code.

But other than that, it feels wide open, and full of peril.

I think I was and still am a bit like you. I was an ex-designer and went into coding because coders would miss half my design specs and took to long to for them to change stuff. Also, I as really underpaid. It's been two years since I wrote my first HTML tag, and I already have fullstack 3 projects from scratch under my belt, and a 4th coming. I usually work alone too.

Anyway, I think the right mindset is doing stuff with "how can this be useful" in mind, and not "I want to be". Nobody cares what you are or want to be, and that might come as arrogant. Most coding tools and frameworks were build with utility in mind.

So, for example, my aim is to make project changes and pivoting as fast as it can be, so I spend time improving my skills in React and NodeJS, annotating the difficulties that MVC patterns brought to me, and designing small Hot Reload utilities (it's the ability to see changes in your code without restarting your app and losing its state). Pick a problem and focus on it.

Then just let “I want to be an engineer” be an alias for “I want to build software that the next developer working on learns something from”.

It’s not about just being someone who is good. Its about actually, in real terms, carrying forward the beacon of the best of our profession.

Because I am utterly stunned by what humans have managed to achieve with computing, floored by all the thinking and sharing that comes out of it.

I love building things and making them useful, but just as much, if not more so, I enjoy passing on that lamp of enlightenment. The struggle to learn is so real, that those who make it easier through their source code, their words, their teaching/sharing/books/tutorials ARE useful.