There's really not much advice to give beyond applying for relevant jobs and learning as much as you can for a few years at a junior level. Importantly, stay curious and try to understand the full stack to at least a basic level of competency.
"Senior" (at least in my opinion) just means you're not going to need hand-holding. If a company is hiring a "senior" dev they tend to mean someone who is competent enough to get on with things on their own.
As soon as you feel you don't need hand-holding I'd start applying for senior positions, but like I say you really need a decent competency across whatever your tech stack is to do that. If you can't use the Linux command line and struggle with Git, but you're a great 3D engineer you're probably not senior enough.
I find it's all the stupid little skills that make a good senior dev. We had a senior frontend guy come to work at my place recently and it was a disaster because he wasn't familiar with basic Git commands and couldn't get his dev environment set up on his own. To be fair with him those weren't "frontend" skills, but skills any good senior dev doing the kind of work he was doing should have.
That said, it's okay to ask a few questions and not know everything, but those should typically be higher level questions - "what's your Git workflow?" not, "how do I use git?", for example.
I am familiar with the tooling but what I lack is in the ability to quickly navigate a code base. Given a period of 2-3 weeks, I can disect a project into the relevant parts, but I feel like it is still slow.
Now the issue I have is contributing to these projects. I am fairly capable of starting on my own, however, if it comes to updating the existing base, that is where I fall short. Any tips on that? I tried open source and basically ended up with same result. Same thing happens when I try to answer to questions on stack overflow. I do not get the confidence to do so.
Comments
There's really not much advice to give beyond applying for relevant jobs and learning as much as you can for a few years at a junior level. Importantly, stay curious and try to understand the full stack to at least a basic level of competency.
"Senior" (at least in my opinion) just means you're not going to need hand-holding. If a company is hiring a "senior" dev they tend to mean someone who is competent enough to get on with things on their own.
As soon as you feel you don't need hand-holding I'd start applying for senior positions, but like I say you really need a decent competency across whatever your tech stack is to do that. If you can't use the Linux command line and struggle with Git, but you're a great 3D engineer you're probably not senior enough.
I find it's all the stupid little skills that make a good senior dev. We had a senior frontend guy come to work at my place recently and it was a disaster because he wasn't familiar with basic Git commands and couldn't get his dev environment set up on his own. To be fair with him those weren't "frontend" skills, but skills any good senior dev doing the kind of work he was doing should have.
That said, it's okay to ask a few questions and not know everything, but those should typically be higher level questions - "what's your Git workflow?" not, "how do I use git?", for example.
I am familiar with the tooling but what I lack is in the ability to quickly navigate a code base. Given a period of 2-3 weeks, I can disect a project into the relevant parts, but I feel like it is still slow.
Now the issue I have is contributing to these projects. I am fairly capable of starting on my own, however, if it comes to updating the existing base, that is where I fall short. Any tips on that? I tried open source and basically ended up with same result. Same thing happens when I try to answer to questions on stack overflow. I do not get the confidence to do so.