1. Prioritize your health. You can't be hot without a crisp jawline. If you are not getting quality sleep you are leaving engineering brainpower on the table. Same thing goes for diet and exercise. This is very well studied: being fit makes you smarter. In addition to peak brain power; being fit will let you work for longer durations. Being fit will allow you to get your core work done faster and leave you with the stamina to continue working on other things (like fun side projects).
2. Pull on threads. Three of three LLMs agree*: openness is super hot. Read the standard library of the programming languages you are using. Read the docs of the libraries you're depending on. Ask folks around about what they think the system is doing and what they think it is supposed to be doing. Experiment with new technologies. Dig through the layers of abstraction your system is built on. Abstraction layers are always a little bit leaky. The ability to hop up and down layers will give you a better grasp of the system as a whole. Regularly ask yourself: how does this work? Why was it built this way?
3. Change your perspective. Scoot back a little from your screen and widen your view. Find the hottest angle. What are you trying to actually accomplish? What is the team goal? The company goal? What is your goal? If you don't change anything how will things look in a year? Don't just consider the programs or systems you're engineering when thinking about these questions. Jobs have turnover: you might have new colleagues in a year. Technology has hype cycles: you might not being working on LLM integrations in a year. Markets ebb and flow: will your company still be making money in a year? These are essential questions to help you steer your career and your life. Knowing where you're going is super hot.
I'll leave you with one last thing. Please remember that software is written for people, not computers. Hotness is for the people.
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*[1] ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini were asked the following prompt: "In the context of the big five personality traits: is openness to experience important to being super hot?"