- What rhubarbcustard said: get interested in the business. This is especially important if you work at the bottom of the stack. You must understand what you us

- What rhubarbcustard said: get interested in the business. This is especially important if you work at the bottom of the stack. You must understand what you users (higher-level developers) want, what the company's customers want, and what the company itself want. - You must decide where you want to go next. The first thing you should think about is: three years from now, will you take the Manager path (lead a team) or the Individual Contributor path. If you choose IC, do you want to specialize, or you want to broaden your skillset and become more of a generalist? In any case, I would say work on soft skills, broaden your horizon (e.g. learn new languages, write front-end code if you do backend and vice-versa, etc) and learn one to three domains very well (look up "T-shaped", this is where you want to go). But focus on the part you will need the most for your next step. - If you go for the generalist IC route, try to work as close to production as possible. That means: deploy your code, monitor what it does to the servers (or machines) it runs on in the wild, watch how real users use it. Also, it is time to learn how your tools (build system, programming language, OS...) work. - If you specialize, pick something with a future, engage with the community, and if possible with Academia. Sometimes when I talk to engineers and mention I read research papers they think I'm crazy, but there is no way you'll be good at an R&D topic if all you do to keep up with research is watch videos and read popular science blog posts. - Have fun. Don't burn yourself out working too much. Keep doing fun side projects, they teach you things you don't learn in a professional setting.