How can one learn software engineering, and not just coding?

Hi, Congrats! You have reached the next level of development! Level 1 was excitement, curiosity, and confidence. Level 2 is doubt, understanding enough to know that you have no idea what you are doing, and a good ole'fashioned imposter syndrome! You are well on your way! But honestly study some paradigm stuff like OOP and functional programming, look into architecture structures, and be sure to read "Clean Code." It really does help when working in a team environment.

You're going to discover that people have different definitions of "engineering." I would suggest avoiding that term and being more specific about the things you want to learn and the things you want to achieve. From your post though, it sounds like you're at a point where you just want to gain more general knowledge and experience. My only advice is just to start building! I think getting more infrastructure knowledge is going to help demystify a lot of it, too. There are always going to be too many things to learn. You're going to have to get comfortable with focusing on the things you care about most in the short term. I honestly struggle with this, too.

Sounds like you have a ways to go yet to understand web development, before you tackle software engineering at large. As many folks have already said, just keep building stuff end to end, it will come!

Go to ChatGPT and start asking it a series of questions on the subject. You need to take its answers with a grain a salt, but it knows a solid bit about the subject and will definitely give you plenty of advice for starting off. Some example prompts: "Outline for me the best way to organize building X app using Node and Mongo, suggest any other packages you think might be appropriate." "I want to make an app that does X. What software should I consider to build the app?" ~~~ "Write me an outline to learn everything there is to know about becoming a software engineer with an emphasis on the architecture and building a software application" After you do that, you can ask it for specific book resources, but you could also take the topics it suggests and ask it further questions or just go Google around. You can use that to expand out TONS of information on any subject, really. Also try to ask it to solve architecture problems. Things like "I want to launch a web app but I am worried the server will go down because of too much traffic. What is the industry best practice to harden my web application against bursts of traffic?" Or something like: "How do I plan in a node application to harden it for production?" GPT 4 seems to get programming topics better, but there are significant limits on it right now. GPT 3.5 should be plenty, though. It has been super helpful for me to tackle problems, break them down, and then work through them piecemeal.

Thanks everyone I'm surely gonna try working on all the advices! Really means a lot to me.