6 tips to supercharge your career in 2024

With the rapid delivery and adoption of AI tools over the last year, it might feel increasingly urgent to define what a productive developer-AI partnership looks like. That’s why we put together a unique list of five tips to give your career a boost in 2024. 

✨ What's special about this list is that it doesn’t just focus on AI. Instead, it’s intended to keep developers well-rounded. We’ll summarize those tips below and add an extra. 

So, here are 6️⃣ tips to keep your skills, development, and identity as a developer intact while you scope the role of AI coding tools in your day-to-day.

Tip 1: Experiment with AI coding tools and platforms, and gather best practices for prompt engineering. 🤖 As a developer, you can provide the AI tool with more context about your project, yielding better, more contextually relevant results. 

For example, rather than writing an entire paragraph to describe what you want GitHub Copilot to generate, try making your asks simple and specific. This requires articulating the logic and steps GitHub Copilot needs to follow to achieve your goal—and, bonus points, it helps you to think through the problem more clearly, too. 🪞 

Letting GitHub Copilot generate code after each step, rather than asking it to generate a bunch of code all at once, also makes it easier for you to review that code and edit as needed. 

Here’s an example of how you can provide GitHub Copilot with step-by-step instructions for reversing a function:

For more guidance on prompt engineering, read:

• 4 ways GitHub engineers use GitHub Copilot
• How to use GitHub Copilot: Prompts, tips, and use cases
• 10 unexpected ways to use GitHub Copilot
• Using GitHub Copilot in your IDE: Tips, tricks, and best practices

GitHub’s Christopher Harrison and Lindsey Bocatto share best practices for interacting with GitHub Copilot.

Tip 2: Navigate repositories and codebases with efficiency by mastering keyboard shortcuts and search functions. 🔎 As discussed in one of our Insider newsletters, learning how to navigate these with ease will make it easier to fix bugs, identify reusable pieces of code, collaborate with other developers, and deepen and expand your understanding of different coding styles and architectures.

To navigate your repository, try these shortcuts:

• G, I  Jump to your issues.

• G, P Navigate to your pull requests.
• G, B Head to your repository.
• G, C: Visit your repository’s code.

And to run a quick search, try these: 

• / Start a quick search.
• S Focus on the site search bar.
• F Search within the code in a repository. 
• T File finder for code search.
• W View code in a workspace. 

Tip 3: Cultivate your soft skills like curiosity 💭and empathy. 💕 These will complement your technical expertise and contribute to your overall success. Nurturing curiosity is an important soft skill to have. As described in a previous edition of Branching Out_, our ability to question reality makes us valuable in the workforce. Computers spit out information and numbers, but developers need to question and analyze how those results came to be and how they can be applied going forward. Ask yourself:

• Why is something done in a particular way?
• How can it be done better next time?
• How did we arrive at those results? 
• Are the results useful and why or why not?   

Empathy, as mentioned, is also a key skill. Since developers are often creating solutions for end users, they need to be able to deeply understand the users’ pain points and needs. Developers need to be able to QA their code in an emotionally intelligent way to ensure their products prioritize the well-being of diverse user groups. 

For more on this, here’s our skills guide for coding in the age of AI.

Tip 4: Use AI to secure your code. 🤖 🔒 In the age of shifting left, developers have become the first line of defense against security vulnerabilities. This change has created pain points for development teams—like friction with security teams, a growing list of high-priority responsibilities, and increased context switching. But there’s hope: by using AI to secure your code, developers can embed security tasks into their workflows with less friction and partner with security teams more productively: 

Security experts at GitHub Universe 2023 on the importance of automation, the impact of AI, and how security teams and developers can work better together.

Tip 5: Learn how to design for accessibility. 👐 Developers who pay attention to accessibility also ensure quality software. 

For example, a developer who designs a system for those with visual impairments can also help someone struggling to read an e-reader in bright sunlight. (A term called “ordinary extraordinary users” can help you remember that designing for extraordinary users also benefits ordinary users in extraordinary circumstances.)

And if you need help getting started with accessible coding, you can enlist the support of GitHub Copilot. 

After setting a foundational accessibility prompt, you can use GitHub Copilot to help generate ideas for accessibility testing, create accessible tables and forms in HTML, and more.

Here’s an example of GitHub Copilot’s response for testing web accessibility once we provided the foundational prompt:

Query input: How can I test for web accessibility?

GitHub Copilot response: There are several ways to test for web accessibility:

1. Manual Testing: This involves navigating your website using only a keyboard, checking color contrast, and resizing text to 200% to ensure readability.
2. Automated Testing: There are several tools available for automated accessibility testing. Some popular ones include: WAVE, a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM; Axe, an accessibility testing toolkit built on a library of accessibility rules; and Lighthouse, an open source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.
3. Screen Reader Testing: This involves testing your website using a screen reader tool. Some popular screen readers include NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver.
4. User Testing: This involves testing your website with people with disabilities. This can provide valuable insights into how accessible your website is in practice. 

For more insights about accessible design, read:

• How to include accessibility as an engineering fundamental 
• Prompting GitHub Copilot Chat to become your personal AI assistant for accessibility
• Accessibility considerations behind code search and code view
• To build better software, learn about accessibility 

Tip 6: Attend GitHub Universe in October! As the world’s fair of software, Universe is the perfect opportunity for you to expand your skill set, gain valuable connections, become inspired, and help you take your developer career to the next level. 

With sessions exploring AI, developer experience (DevEx), and security, you’ll have the opportunity to explore the latest products, best practices, and insights shaping the future of software development.

🌐 👩🏾💻 Get 30% off with our Super Early Bird Discount now. 

🌟 Bonus tip: from May 21-23, take advantage of Microsoft Build’s free virtual sessions, where you can explore and discuss how AI will shape the future of programming. 

🌟 🌟 Bonus tip 2: learn how to use GitHub by subscribing to the GitHub Insider newsletter. 👇 Once a month, you’ll receive a curated list of tips and tricks for supercharging your productivity on GitHub. 

More GitHub goodness: 

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✨ This newsletter was written by Nicole Choi and produced by Gwen Davis. ✨