If you’re an engineer, three skills will show up in almost every serious project. Learn them early. They’re the spine of almost everything we build.
1. Progress systems
Every food app has progress. Every gym app. Every government portal. 42 tracks your progress. People love seeing where they stand, the bar filling up, the level unlocking, the you’re almost there. You’ll build progress systems again and again. Get good at them. They’re the dopamine loop that keeps users coming back.
2. User authentication
Non-negotiable. Any serious product has users, and users need identity. Log in, sign up, reset password, sessions, tokens. Learn it once; use it forever. The day you skip it is the day you’re debugging “who did what” at 2 a.m. Don’t skip it.
3. Databases
You will live with them for the rest of your career. A good schema and clean queries make your life easier. A bad one makes every feature a fight, migrations, N+1s, “why is this so slow?” Marry the basics early. Your future self will thank you.
One more thing: learn to finish. Engineers love starting. New repo, new idea, new stack. We’re bad at shipping. We polish until the shine wears off. Break the habit. Finish what you start, even when the code feels like shit a week later. Done beats perfect. A shipped thing in the world beats a perfect thing in your head.