Medior to senior coding skills

I did not write about my carreer fuel, coding and architecture so far.

If you followed me for a while, I write a lot about personal skills, leadership challenges, mindset, and other soft-skill topics. And always relate it to hard skills like software engineering.

As I was returning to my childhood passion of creating video games, I found increasingly harder to find good resources. Not that anything out there would not be good. There are an amazing amount of beginner content out there.

What about medior to senior content though? I managed to get great courses done and did what I usually do as part of my job. Researched myself topics. Decomposed the bigger problem into smaller chunks and searched for solutions to the chunks myself.

Building and deploying with engine to mobile? Of course, two dozen documentations and a few videos, a day or so struggling and managed to do my deployment. Mind you, I can do automated deployments of dozens of microservices under same time period due to already done it a few times.

Learning a new practice is always exciting. At first. Then you want to make something unique. Main reason why I am in this craft. And then it starts to fall apart.

Excitement subsides as you dig through the 30th two pager API documentation. As you struggle to add just one more tiny game mechanic to the already encumbered architecture. What worked great for one system, is not directly applicable for games.

While I personally love this part of the craft, the figure out for myself if I can make it work, it takes a lot of effort. No AI can help with thinking up novel systems.

What I see missing is advanced materials or how to find good quality advanced materials. Even if you pay for a course, there is no guarantee it will show actual best in class solutions. After all, the experts knowing those best in class solutions are employed to create them, not to teach them to random people.

Getting into an industry is another arduous and lengthy process, riddled with downturns and hardened by organizations wanting value out of their employees as soon as possible.

Right now what we have easily available on the Internet:

• simple, basic, starter tutorials (endless articles),
• premade templates (another todo application in the 52nd language and framework combination),
• courses great at beginner to medior topics (like learn game development in 30 days will get you started, on a multi-year journey for the first actual working and enjoyable one),
• separate skillsets in siloed teaching (e.g. leadership and management principles are taught separately, not in context),
• narrowest possible problems and their solutions (e.g. stackoverflow style articles).

What do you miss in your career journey?

Would you take a course that teaches skills holistically, in context?