On Working

Transitioning from academia to industry felt like a big change. Many concepts I was already familiar with were wrapped into new technologies such as Azure and Databricks. At first, this was overwhelming—the learning curve felt steep. But just like in university, the knowledge comes with time and practice.

Now that I’ve been working for a while, I’ve reflected on what I’m most grateful to have learned before leaving academia.

Concepts

When learning a new tool or idea, don’t just focus on why you should use it. It’s equally important to understand the pitfalls each tool or concept brings. Knowing the tradeoffs makes you a stronger engineer.

Some key concepts I always keep in mind are:

Single Responsibility Principle
OOP design patterns
Functional programming concepts
Proper code structure
Coupling between modules

Tools

Learning the core functionality of the following tools has been invaluable for simplifying daily work. These tools have proved time and time again to reduce tedious tasks into simple one-liners in the terminal.

regex
Linux shell (bash/zsh)
- find
- grep
- sort
- sed
- perl
git

Paradigms Over Languages

Most important of all is the focus on learning programming paradigms rather than brute-forcing your way through more and more languages. Many languages are meant to be used in similar ways, each with their own tradeoffs and advantages.

By learning the broader paradigms, it becomes much easier to adapt to new languages with the help of resources like Learn X in Y Minutes.