Ask HN: As a software developer, what do I focus on next?

There may be at least two forks in the road - take one of them.

Consider this: you can continue to improve a) your skills and knowledge and b) software engineering itself.

Or, you can use what you know and are learning to help fix the planet, by which I mean: look around: political polarization prevents finding solutions to massive, urgent, and wicked problems - problems made wicked because society has forgotten how to collaborate. Do we need WWIII to bring us together? Do we need complete collapse of some major region due to climate change to bring us together? Or, can we, as software engineers, scientists, and human beings use our massive and growing skills and knowledge to help society sort things out?

Couple of forks in the road. Pick one.

and i feel like you could not really understand one without the other.

i also feel it's a good idea to get really good at at least one language and its toolchain/ecosystem as opposed to trying to learn a little bit of every language/ecosystem. b/c being half-assed at everything is just not very useful -- being really good at one language can boost your productivity 10 or 100x from where you are as a beginner.

so part of that would be to continue increasing your expertise in whatever language(s) you happen to be using - b/c it's easy to get lazy - and you'll pay the price in productivity - if you care about that kind of thing, and presumably you do.

i suspect doing open source stuff is great for learning, and great for future job prospects, but no practical experience there. i've often built side projects and they've helped me land gigs, especially if i didn't come off as an entrepreneur-type.

one piece of advice i heard from an unrelated field (sort of) -- is to pick a problem that interests you, then try to solve it.