It’s been a little bit more than a year since I’ve become a junior developer and I’ve made a funny list of tips I learnt during this journey.
1. Patience. I know you are in the moment you want to learn everything and more, but you need to be organized and make choices. What should I learn first and why?
2. Ask to the seniors. The best way to learn is meeting with those developers who are more experienced. Ask whenever you have some doubts, it’s perfectly fine to be wrong and to make mistakes, you will learn from those mistakes so don’t be ashamed for that.
3. Respect. There would be moments when you will have to prove yourself to be a better person. In the best case you will have a great guidance from your Team and a great Project Manager, but also there would be cases where you would have to deal with some tough personalities. This is the time to find out the best version of you. Think about it in this way: what if you could have done better? Be critical of your work, even though you see that the rest is not.
4. Compete only with yourself. You will meet a lot of developers, and probably they would be more experienced than you. Don’t try to be better to catch them up, try to be better for your own experience, otherwise you will feel frustrated because people learn in different ways and times.
5. Don’t give up. I won’t lie. You will be frustrated more times than you can imagined but the best thing is you will always have another opportunity to do it better.
6. Be humble. It’s great to be confident, but also it’s better if you understand that you are a human being who can make mistakes. Learn from them and accept when they happen. Make sure to let this know to your team.
7. Be a good team partner. You will spend a lot of time with this people so it would be much better if you have a great time with them at the same time. Talk to them, connect whenever you need, offer help whenever you can.
8. Communicate. Communication is the base of everything, if you can’t communicate what you need your team won’t know what you need or how to help you. This is something that you will have to learn day by day .
DECLAIMER:
This is not the constitution. Everyone could have their own personal list. It's a way to share my experience in order to inspire others to do so.
Finally, the cover image is my cat, be careful if you look at it really closely it can take your soul, ha ha.
Happy coding! :)
Top comments (9)
The first one! I love it! I tried to go straight to frameworks, and guest what? I was always feeling lost! I download a lot of tutorials (Laravel, React, Vue, Angular) and don't really get it. When -youtubers- says "you don't need to know X language to try this", that ruins me a lot. Now, a couple months ago I started from the scratch, Core PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, step by step, and I just begins to realize what frameworks are about... I'm always like "oh! This is what the guy on the video was doing", and frustration is starting to go down in my life. Thanks for this article!
I appreciate that you find it useful! Of course, It happened to me too!
Remove the word junior from the title of this article. The same advice applies regardless of your position or title.
Possibly! The thing is that it sounds catchy and It was my own experience as a junior developer as I said in the post. It's nice though that you find it motivating regardless your position. Thanks!
🥺
Many years ago, I developed a talk along much these same lines. (Here's my most recent version, which is still a few years old. Apologies if anything is out of date.)
Thanks for your input!
So true. :)
Absolutely agree! Great!