Development as a programmer

Senior -> code more
Architect -> soft skills

Unsurprisingly, focus on architecture.

Go do a project in your spare time (it really works better for spare-time projects than work projects), and take your time to make the whole thing as well-designed as possible. Every time you identify a wart, or some structure that seems needlessly complex and could be simplified, you redesign things to suit your aesthetic with no considerations for wasting time. Make it a thing of beauty and perfection.

When you are done, look at what you have wrought and do it better. Perfect the design after it is already working and neat. Improve and improve. Do not stop until you can think of *literally nothing* to improve the code. (Note: you are working on the design and architecture of the CODE, not the functionality.)

At some point, ask other people what they think about your design. Odds are they can still find things to improve that you didn't think of.

When you are done, and you can think of no way whatsoever to further improve things, start a new project, at the limit of your capabilities. Repeat a dozen times. At that point, you should be very capable of approaching a complex problem the RIGHT way without considering too many sensible-looking design decisions that turn out to be totally stupid later.

Senior roles are mostly gated by experience and soft skills.

You need experience, both in breadth and in depth. Learn more about more programming languages, more different ways of working. Learn a lot more about a few programming languages, so you can tackle lots of different challenges with them. (Don't stick to just frontend dev.) Also learn how programs fit together at a higher level; try tracking the entire life of an action taken by a user from the very front-most frontend to the point where it causes permanent changes on disk in a database on a server, and then back out to a change in the user interface; there's a whole lifecycle of information in there, and you should try to understand it all, at least somewhat.

But also find out about the contexts that you're developing within. Programs don't exist in isolation, but are instead written to do what customers and users want. Try to understand that side of things too. (Note that most people only get to understand a small number of these domain areas in their life; it's non-trivial to get into one.) Soft/people skills can help a lot here.

Those are the paths to seniority. And they're not things that usually happen quickly.

Thanks a lot for the extensive answers guys!

I was also wondering if I should focus on perfecting frontend skills, or is going full stack a better idea?

>>59578756
A bit inbetween imo. You don't have to become a full stack dev, remaining a specialist is probably wiser right now. But instead of going much deeper into frontend, at least know the basics. They define a lot of WHY you are doing things the way you do them. Get some basic databases knowledge. Learn a bit about concurrency, SQL (its not outdated anyone who tells you otherwise is a retard), Linux, Apache/Nginx WSGI, etc.
It can make you a much more competent dev in a relatively short time which is more efficient than diving deeper into niche JS/CSS hacks