Self-improvement is something that everyone wants in their life whether it is in terms of their lifestyle, status, habits, learning, financial or personal growth, health, etc. But based on a person's priority, that improvement may vary. In this article, I will share which online tools and resources were most helpful for me to improve as a developer/software engineer.

Starting with my journey of self-improvement

I will describe the online tools which helped me to self-improve as a developer/software engineer in a two-part journey. The first part of the journey will give you a brief about the tools which mostly helped me in my student life .i.e, in my college time. The second part will discuss the same journey in my corporate life. 😊

Part I - Self-improvement journey as a developer in college time

During college time, for the initial 1-2 semesters I only used to read the notes provided by the professors. 😅 Then, I felt that I am not growing and learning things as a problem solver. So, the thought was to improve my problem-solving ability. I thought to start with learning basic programming concepts of C++ and Java. I learned this using TutorialsPoint and JavaTpoint. After this, I started with data structures and algorithms. For this, I used GeeksForGeeks and CodeChef.

Till this time, one year has passed and I got good learning of programming concepts and problem-solving. Then, I learned website development. In the initial days, I learned from my seniors. After I was able to understand the entire workflow, then only I started by taking online courses. I took courses from Udemy and Skillsoft to learn the latest frameworks in web development as they were project oriented. Apart from this, I have read framework documentation such as for React, Angular, etc. whenever I am stuck. This is how my self-improvement journey as a developer was in my college days.

Part II - Self-improvement journey as a software engineer in the corporate world

In the corporate world, all things majorly revolve around client requirements, business units, budget, managers, and teammates. Luckily, I got good teammates and managers who always inspired me to be a better coder and problem solver. I learned a lot from my teammates and managers. My manager always motivated me to do certifications. As a result, I am now a Microsoft Certified Data Engineer and Microsoft Power BI Certified Data Analyst. In the entire certification journey, Microsoft official learning path and Guy in a cube helped me a lot.

Apart from this, as a .NET Full stack developer C# Corner has been my all-time favorite. Apart from this, communities like Hashnode, Dev.io, Digital Ocean have helped me to connect and share knowledge with the developer community in the form of blog posts.

Conclusion

I had a lot of pleasure writing this article let me know in the comments what did you think of my self-improvement journey as a software developer. 😎

See you next time!