The advantage of your position is that being a tech lead gives you a lot of ownership and responsibility, and that is one of the best ways to learn a lot in a s

The advantage of your position is that being a tech lead gives you a lot of ownership and responsibility, and that is one of the best ways to learn a lot in a short time. The disadvantage is that it’s hard to grow beyond what you can visualize, so past a certain point you’ll likely be growing slower than you would working under someone with 10-20 more years of experience. I would advise one of two paths: either stick around a year or two u til you can confidently own “tech lead” on your resume and move on, or commit to a longer stint and really reap the learning benefits of the technical leadership position. So much for the unsolicited career advice :). To answer the direct question, a few things I found useful as a startup CTO: - Follow the news for your tech stack. Stay up to date with the various technologies. Go to meetups. - Think about the long-term development of your system. Spend 1% of your time thinking about where you might be in a year or two, and do some experiments to explore those paths. Your codebase is the best place for you to experiment with new tools as it’s a real-world system with the warts that reality brings. You don’t have to merge these experiments! As CTO I had probably 20% of my PRs as RFC / experimental work. (I do not advise contributing to FOSS for learning in your scenario. Feel free to do so if you enjoy it though.) - keep an Architecture Decision Log. Review the big decisions you made in hindsight, and learn the lessons that you can only learn if you own a system for multiple years. Eg this DB choice seemed good and bought us a year of scale reprieve, but then required a 2 man-year rewrite down the road. Knowing the true value of “I” will make you much better at judging tradeoffs in ROI. - Beware burnout. If you are studying and leisure coding in your spare time you will eventually run the tank dry. It might take 5 years or it might take less. Just be mindful. - Don’t be terrified of burnout. The tech lead position is a unique opportunity to feel ownership of a system and have the autonomy to try things out. It’s a role where pushing harder can yield more leverage than a normal position. So putting in some extra hours can pay off in the long run for your career.