Language absolutely is a marketable skill because most companies are looking to hire someone who can start working day one not someone they’ll have to train for weeks or even months in a new language that heavily relies on some specific framework.
Jira is a pain, slow, bloated, and ugly.
Trello okay is for student projects, too basic.
ClickUp was decent when I used it professionally, I still use it for personal project management.
Azure DevOps is baby’s 1st JIRA, but somehow Microsoft made it worse in every way.
I find that code written towards fulfilling some specific database design is usually a nightmare about 20minutes into the project. You end up with garbage semantics and interfaces because you’re building an entire app for the sake of storing stuff in a database. It’s an ass backwards approach to software development imo, software is about solving a human problem and data persistence is just one of the steps in the solution. Instead figure out what data your consumers need, then figure out what domain objects can be extracted from that, then plan how you will persist those domain objects. You’ll end up with less boilerplate, better naming of entities and services and you’ll also find that the words your team uses to talk to each other make sense to your business people not just your dba.
Microservices and document db’s go brrrrrrr. Data duplication is completely fine as long as there is only one source of truth that can be updated, all copies must be read only. Then the copies should either regularly poll the source or the source should publish update events that the copies can consume to stay in sync. It’s simple stuff but keeps your system way more available and fast than having multiple services talk to a shared db or worse, multiple services constantly fetching data through a proxy.
Legacy code is just code inherited from developers that are no longer around. It's quality has nothing to do with its age.
Last 2 job changes I told the recruiters my current company is not paying competitively and the annual raises are below inflation. Then we agreed on my expected salary range. They got back to me within a day or two with offers and both times I was signing a new contract within a week.
They respected my bluntness and aimed to meet my expectations. I'm in the UK and I find that outside the hipster businesses or blatant venture capital scam startups, in tech, people respect being to the point and honest.
Sadly both times my existing employers couldn't afford to meet my new salary range when I got the counter offers, I would've stayed if they matched or exceed.
I'm also honest and to the point when interviewing and my interview to offer ratio is about 1/3. The other times they find someone cheaper or they're one of those companies that expect a full stack senior dev at mid tier salary. I never got ghosted or declined, it was always that I asked for too much money and I declined the counter offer.
Also, never complain about your current job. Instead say what you want/expect and mention that you're not getting it in the current role. I find that recruiters and interviewers address these expectations very early in the process.