Working in ISP and Managed Hosting environments made me a better engineer. Lots of unix/linux, networking, DNS, etc. Lots of support and problem solving. It all led to both a breadth and depth of experience. It's been a useful foundation for my career even after moving into other areas like swe and ml.

Be actively curious.

Examples: Take up hobbies. Learn new things -- especially things that aren't obviously related to engineering. Keep up with your field (I don't mean you need to be competent in every aspect, but that you should be curious and aware).

Think of others and write more. Going into new stuff is hard, and if there's docs written down, that helps keep everybody working.

Write more in your PRs, write more in notion, write more in Google Docs; just write more. If things are unclear at your company, take it upon yourself to start writing and add documentation. If you come across a weakly filled out Jira ticket you know something about, write about it. If you know code conventions that aren't linter enforce, write them down.

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