Start before you feel ready
Chances are you'll hit a snag when working on the assigned feature and you might even feel miserable. We've been all there (heck, we're still all there some of the time), but the only way to become better is to start the quest. As Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
Protect your attention & energy
Software engineering can be challenging, which is part of why we want to do it. What makes it harder still is not giving it your full focus and trying to think in abstract concepts on an average of five hours of sleep. So put your phone away, give sleep its due priority and take care of your health.
Express yourself clearly
Working in teams requires clear and efficient communication for a myriad of reasons. You could have the best idea on the planet – if you can't explain it to your coworkers or managers, it's worth nothing. If a code review comment takes seven back & forths because your words are sloppy, you incur a deluge of context switches – a productivity killer. Oh, and AI assistants perform way better when your instructions are clear.
Level up by learning from others
It's a cliché that our profession is one of where life-long learning is a must. Luckily, there is an infinite amount of ways you can do that: being mentored by more experienced engineers or pairing with them, reading open source code from reputable authors, reading blogs, books, or asking AI to help you make sense of something are all great methods. The important bit is to stay curious, and take some time to learn new things.
Write code both humans and AI understand
On the road of becoming more experienced developers, we tend to start writing smart code, abbreviating variable names and using cunning shortcuts. It's natural, but resist the temptation, and keep writing dumb code.
Your colleagues and your future self will thank you. (Your AI agent will tell you you're a genius when you write smart code, but secretly, it also prefers you writing clearly instead.)
Master your tools
As a software engineer, you spend a big part of your day in your editor, terminal, making commits, rebasing, diffing, testing things in your browser or your IDE.
Becoming more efficient with them and customizing them to your liking is a force multiplier, so take your time to learn them well.
Don't fear debugging / Become a bug buster