I have an open question for software engineers out there:
As someone that has never studied CS but has written basic code most of my life (accelerated now with AI), where is the best place to learn software engineering fundamentals?
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I don't think there is such a thing as "software engineering fundamentals", as the fundamentals differ based on the type of software you want to make.
Do you want to make websites, or work on embedded systems?
Do you need to squeeze every OK ounce of performance out of the machine running your code, or is developer velocity more important to you?
Will your code run on a single machine, or does it need to be networked/distributed?
The thing you want to make determines what the fundamentals will look like for that area of study. There isn't enough time to learn the fundamentals of everything needed to make good software across all domains. And even if there was, you would be wasting time learning all the principles that don't apply to 99% of things you would be working on at a given moment.
There are tons of core principles that can be learned that largely apply across fields.
One prime example, single source of truth for data/concepts. To be violated only when performance is meaningfully improved (denormalized databases). But when you do so, you should definitely recognize you're opening up out of sync issues for that performance gain.
Though for the majority of code, there is no performance benefit to adding multiple sources of truth. Yet it's the most common error I see re: quality.
The sad thing is that software engineering fundamentals and best practices never became widespread or widely taught in school prior to LLMs
Learn more engineering, any structured engineering. Electronics is particularly applicable, but hardly the only field that fits. Learning to find sources of error, how to handle precision and the systems of organization - all help.
I'm self-taught - could never afford much university... but I worked "odd jobs", such as assistant jobs in land surveying, welding, and electronics - and those all opened my eyes to a lot more. (I do have some university though, as well as a lot of experience... every time I line up to go back to learn more, I end up working instead, for a job I enjoy).
Oh yeah, a lot of basic engineering texts are online, or in libraries. Check them out if you can.
I don't think you can learn without doing the actual work where normal constraints apply so you can test and see the pros and cons of different approaches to different aspects of the problem(s).
You need a limited budget, limited timeline, limited capabilities in team and software tools+systems, and you need to be on the hook for support, maintenance and long term extensibility.
Software engineering is an optimization problem balancing all of the above and much more. There is no one answer to any problem, but more of a general sweet-ish spot (or more like region than spot) of balancing the competing priorities.
I have a bachelors degree in computer science and engineering. I can tell you that throughout my 15 years of career as a software engineer (mostly backend, in fintec and JVM languages) the only things that helped me from what I learned in university were algorithms, data structure, cryptography and database internals.
Apart from that, everything else I learned when I started working (aws, design principles and coding conventions, system design patterns, domain driven design, etc.) I had to read so many books after university (pre-AI era) to learn all those things. That's what I would suggest. There are great books to learn algorithms, and data structures which is fundamental.
This applies to more than just CS, but pick a concept and relentlessly ask why it exists until you hit a physical, mathematical, or logical reality that we cannot change/control.
For example, why do web apps use a cache? Because pulling from the main DB is too slow. Why is it slow? Because storing massive amounts of permanent data requires large, dense physical disks that must be located further away from the CPU. Why does that physical distance matter? Because we cannot rewrite the laws of physics -> (Fundamental: data transmission is constrained by the speed of light) -> an electrical signal traveling across a 5cm motherboard will universally take longer to arrive than a signal traveling 1mm from a temporary local cache.
Once you’ve found the fundamental, ascend back up to the surface concept you descended from, and that may solidify the theory a bit. To reinforce it you’ll need to pair it with practice.
Making lots of things and learning what works. It's good to read and find ideas to grow, but a volume of work is the most important thing. You'll discover a lot of the ideas on your own out of need. Keeping an eye out for tools and ideas related to what you enjoy can help broaden your horizons, but time spent making things is best
I recommend Execute Program to all new learners. I like the "learning by writing small snippets of code" approach.
https://www.executeprogram.com/
Covers Python, SQL, Javascript and Typescript.
I would read (and work though the exercises in) "how to design programs", then follow it up with "the pragmatic programmer". that should catch you up with a lot of best practices.