Open source contribution can be really great. I started contributing to a Python project that I have used extensively and it 100% improved my coding. It also can allow for you to interact with more experienced devs (depending on the project) and allows for you to get feedback.
I interviewed for a position that I was comfortably qualified for. As soon as they mentioned a 3 hour whiteboard interview in person I politely hung up the zoom call.
On the flip side, I had a company give the best interview process of all time. They told you how many people were remaining in the rounds. The programming task was to implement a hugging face model as a FastAPI. There was also a short video interview that took 5 minutes if you had basic ML knowledge. Likely took 1-2 hours tops and it was actually fun.
I started using poetry on a research project and was blown away at how good it is. Next week I start a new job and I am hoping it is the standard.
Welp. This is me. I spent a few hours debugging a failing test that was caused by a package update. If only I checked the changelogs…